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?
The problem with that is that you need to know enough about the subject to know when it’s just making shit up to sound clever. If you don’t, and you just believe everything it says, you’re going to be teaching yourself bollocks.
Absolutely, that’s why in my thread I was specifically asking how to go about researching online given search engine commercialization/“optimization” and AI “hallucinations”.
In a funny twist, my question may have been better suited to this community, given its specificity, and OP’s question may have been better suited to asklemmy with its more relaxed phrasing. In any event, it’s been reassuring to see that others are muddling through similar problems lately and trying to rethink how we approach navigating the web.