It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?

  • @Deathcrow@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16•2 years ago

    There’s an interesting blog post on this subject (likely someone posted it already): https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying

    I find it to be very agreeable. Search is dying and I don’t agree that appending “site:reddit.com” is any kind of permanent solution, just a workaround that will also break.

    • @madcaesar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4•2 years ago

      It’s already breaking.

      1. Some stuff just links to deleted comments

      2. Newer stuff is just crap since a lot of knowledge has left the site

  • @Temperche@feddit.deEnglish
    -1•2 years ago

    Use your critical thinking while reading to differentiate between scientifically sound claims and nonscientific marketing paroles.

    • @Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8•2 years ago

      It only works at the low level and for the really brainless stuff.

      There are a lot of things which beyond a certain level require domain specific expertise to spot the bullshit.

      One of the first things the genuine skeptic figures out is the limits of one’s own capability to evaluate information.

      You can use some heuristics to try and spot greedy/marketing bollocks even in domains you don’t understand in depth (for example: cui bono - if those pushing a message benefit from others believing it, it instantly goes into the “untrusted” mental bucket) but even that only goes so far (it’s not by chance that, for example, in politics and economics most Think Tanks hide their sources of funding: it hides the direct link between “studies” they publish those who fund them benefiting if the public and politicians believe those “studies”).

      In summary, do it whilst being aware that we’re all limited and as smart as one is there are plenty of equally smart people who make money from swindling others.

  • @willya@lemmyf.ukEnglish
    6•2 years ago

    Have good filters for all the crap and use search engines with modifiers. What’s a subject or thing you’ve struggled to research so I can see if I have the same issue?

  • @Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•2 years ago

    There’s a lot of competition and a big overload of data. That makes searching for stuff really hard. Don’t know the solution…

  • ZeroXHunterEnglish
    -7•2 years ago

    Just use a chatbot, it works like a charm. I personally use bing chat’s api to get good information.

  • @Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    18•2 years ago

    You’re asking about a pretty tough problem, and I don’t have the silver bullet for that one. However, I do have some tools that might help you out a bit. None of these tools are 100% reliable, so take everything with a grain of salt.

    Fakespot and reviewmeta can help weeding out some of the junk reviews.

    When I have a lot of text to go through, I just dump all of it on chatGPT or Bing and ask for a summary. It’s a language model after all, so it should be pretty good at this sort of thing. A horse won’t plow a field all by itself, but if you’re there to steer it, it will get the job done faster than you would.

    When I’m looking for a good book to read, I’ll usually use the reviews of goodreads. Just skip all the 5-star reviews, because they are usually written by people who aren’t competent at reviewing books. Take all the the 1-4 star reviews dump them on your favorite LLM and let it look for frequently reoccurring complaints.

  • @mycroft@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8•2 years ago

    And everyone gave me shit for keeping my feedly account.

    The Reader died, but the feeds do live on, between mastodon, lemmy and feedly I got plenty to read.

      • @mycroft@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4•2 years ago

        Go digging? That hasn’t really changed has it? If a report pops up in my feed speaking about some scientific study, I try and go to the journal or the arxiv to find the study itself so I can read the summaries. If I really can’t find anything first party, if I’ve got some personal knowledge on the topic I might just write the paper’s author and ask for a copy (they’re often very willing and excited to share) or use my library provided JSTOR access?

        Google scholar still mostly works as well… but yeah I only use it every other week or so.

        Like this isn’t new, science twitter has mostly moved to mastadon so most of the time there’s an arxiv link in the “Study released today…” toots etc.

        There are some new youtubers trying to spread the word, but yeah like the same way you’ve always researched?

      • @chb@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8•2 years ago

        I guess it’s training. In german we have a word for it that translates to “media competence”, something way not enough people have.

        It contains several things (some already mentioned before):

        • learn how to search, good and bad phrases, etc.
        • over read all the pages that look like crap (only gained from experience)
        • never trust one source, always double check, maybe with a different search engine

        It hardly depends on the topic you want to research and mostly depends on experience.

        • @ALostInquirer@lemm.eeEnglish
          1•2 years ago

          I think in English that term might be media literacy, but as you observe, it’s not terribly common, which is frustrating given that it’s been needed even prior to the internet’s emergence.

          Is “media literacy/competency” taught much in Germany, but perhaps not well? Either way, your advice is good even if it wasn’t taught or taught well!

          • @chb@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2•2 years ago

            No unfortunately not. There are some movements that try to get it into the learning plan of schools but with not much success yet.

            So right now parents have to teach their kinds, but many of them don’t have any competence on their own, so no teaching happens on times were the negative movements learn (or already learned) to use this lack of knowledge to manipulate.

            Phishing is one of the best examples.

            I feel how I get frustrated while writing :D

  • @Maybe@lemm.eeEnglish
    7•2 years ago

    Honestly, niche YouTube channels. The problem is sometimes you don’t want to sit through a 30-45 minute video to find the information you’re after.