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?
Mostly Google-fu and a strong Spidey sense of links that look like they’ll waste your time.
Type stuff into Google.
Scroll down until you find something that looks like a forum. Random PHPBB boards, Stack Overflow, Reddit, old Experts Exchange topics, etc. Or a wiki page.
If it isn’t one of those two things, it’s probably AI generated blogspam with a dozen adverts on it.
Google-fu is no longer valid
Yeah, it’s all been exploited by SEO. Search was always doomed to turn to shit. It’s an escalation game that never ends.
I remember when google originally broke into the search engine space because they gave results that were actually useful.
Given that is no longer the case, I wonder if the system is now ripe for another search engine competitor…that does what google used to do.
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I think meta-search engines like searx are very good avoiding seo if configured correctly