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?
It is so ironic that SEO has become the very problem it was invented to fix: all these jokers gaming the system have all but plunged us all back into prehistoric internet times, before search engines appeared and people had to remember which specific sites to go to find information online.
SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. “users arent looking at our site enough.” You’re fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.
The very conceit of SEO defeats the purpose of a search. The idea is the search combs through sites, finds what the user wants, and returns it to them based on what it believes is the closest match to what the user wanted. It’s a process between two parties: the user and the search engine. The second the websites start trying to inject themselves into this process by adjusting their content to the search, it corrupts the process.
Picture yourself in a library looking through the card catalog. You’re searching for something, using a system to locate it. Imagine if the books you’re looking for spontaneously changed their titles or authorship just to “help you find them” while you’re flipping through cards. Imagine if you’re walking down the shelves and books are literally shifting around like fucking Hogwarts, trying to get in front of you.
That is the inherent issue with SEO. No one but the user knows what the user wants to see, the content trying to adjust itself to appear in the results more consistently isn’t about helping the user find what they want, it’s about making sure the user sees that specific content.
Because every website wants traffic. That’s all it is.
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That’s accurate and doesn’t contradict the person you replied to. What they are saying is that SEO was never about fixing a search engine user’s problem; it exists to solve web host’s problem of “we aren’t getting enough ad revenue.”
The same is going to happen with these LLMs once they rely more and more on searching the web: folks are going to find out how to poison the results in a way that pushes users toward their products/services/ads.
SEO should always have been called index poisoning, because that’s exactly what it is.
Every site wants traffic, and I’ve been guilty of gaming search results myself in the past, but also don’t forget the other big conflict here:
Google wants ad revenue.
As such, if you are small and do it honestly, you have very little chance of getting any actual traffic your way because Google sends everyone to the “big end of town” and search engines / internet marketing has become a pay to win platform.
Back links made sense when we were all linking to each other early on because it was how you found good content, but nobody is linking to anyone anymore - unless it’s for some return to the linker, such as making a high traffic blog post with affiliate links etc - and it’s time to come up with another method.
Right now most effective for me to get information / reviews is add “Reddit” to the search and you get a discussion of the pros and cons. I’ve been using chatgpt for a surprising amount of “I just need to know this general info” kind of stuff. Ie I used chatgpt to work out the temperature and time it would take to dehydrate lemons in the oven, and also how to clean said oven with what I had on hand. Both of these would have been much more time consuming to do the traditional way, and I would have been bombarded with ads and people’s life stories before they get to the “just use vinegar” part
The problem is that monied interests want to control the spin on information, just as General Electric was able to strictly govern television news during the cold war, and the George W. Bush administration and the military industrial complex wanted to control the newspapers and news sites during the war on terror (and game reviews occasionally gave below 7.0 out of 10)
Truth leaks to the people though novel means of communication, sadly with all the rumors. And any time a fact-checking service develops a reputation for veracity, it’s going to face pressure to close, such as Snopes; or pressure to adhere to company marketing guidelines such as Wikipedia, for whom Kelloggs Company and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints both have a marketing subdepartment devoted to assuring no controversies or elaborations will stay on their respective Wikipedia pages without a generous dollop of hagiography.
So yes, figuring out the real deal is still an art form like processing data to get intel. For old stuff (e.g. Brigham Young’s randy exploits seducing young girls with religious mandates) we look for the theses that point to primary sources. But for new stuff, we cross-examine multiple news reports for the consistent facts, and avoid interpretation.
As for product information, yes it’s often to find out important stuff like how secure your IoT appliance is. You can assume it’s not unless they can specify how they made it so without buzzwords.
Stick to sites you know. If you’re looking for a review and you get a hit on a site you don’t know there’s a better than 50% chance it’s just an ad generated site (and frequently these days just the output from chatgpt).
Sucks for lesser known sites that are trying to get noticed, but unless google work out a way of removing the crap from feeds that’s the way it is.
Same with youtube… unless you trust the reviewer, assume it’s paid unless there’s good evidence otherwise.
Search for reddit/lemmy mentions specifically… although those can be astroturfed too… but the comments are generally helpful.
You hit the nail on the head, mate!
In previous times, I used to follow certain sites with more attention, but then life happened and I lost track of things and now several sites have closed and I don’t know where to start.
For example, I used to dig GameSpy for game reviews, but it closed. I rarely buy games these days, but I don’t know what to read (I remember IGN, but I don’t know if it’s good). I can check out reviews on Steam, but they’re short reviews.
Same deal goes for PC reviews or computer accessories. I don’t know where to look: everything looks like an ad site. I remember PCmag.com but I don’t know if itself is an ad site or what compare it to, if I wanted to check a second opinion. Every YouTube video about technology feels like an sponsored ad, though some are legit
For videogames specifically, I usually turn to these sources for reliable advice:
- Eurogamer and other reputable media outlets I’ve been following for years, so I know their journalists well and their tastes
- Metacritic and GameFAQs
- Watch streamers play the game I’m interested in for a while and make up my own mind as to whether I like what I see or not
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
I like OpenCritic for game reviews now. It’s a site that aggregates a lot of reviews into one site. If not there I always trust steam reviews of games.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
Games I tend to look for people playing it on twitch. You can’t get much better than actually seeing a game in action to know if it’s for you.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer! I am still resisting watching Twitch for lack of time, but if that’s a good source, I’ll go for it!
To add to this, I suggest sorting the comments by controversial on Reddit for another take.
Lemmings are going to crucify me for this, but here goes anyway…
site:www.reddit.com
Fair. One day that recommendation will end up being a lemmy instance instead.
I mean, technically it should work if you use an instance that is federated with most other instances.
Perfectly understandable imo. Reddit has been around for ages and has a huge backlog of information that users aggregated. Can’t really expect Lemmy to match that after only (somewhat) taking off not that long ago. And i won’t fault anyone for using this accumulated knowledge, i can’t quite avoid it myself.
For me the big question is where people contribute new things. And considering how reddit is behaving, Lemmy/the Fediverse is the far better place to do so.
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.
I go on 4chan and insult the product/thing/person that I need info on. Then I wait, rubbing my uhhh hands like a perv behind the tree.
4chan has proven surprisingly useful as of late. A hell of a lot more than reddit and Google.
I guess rule 7 (Anon is still able to deliver) applies here
I would give you lemmy gold for this comment if it existed…
I think it’s becoming a lost art … but basically, you need to go by reputation. Pick well known sites that you trust, compare what they say about the subject, don’t even base your opinion on just one random blog article or tweet / reddit / lemmy post.
For some, Wikipedia is trustworthy since it (usually) cites its sources and has a pretty good track record, while for others it’s not to be trusted, cause anyone can edit it. In the end it’s up to you what you trust. Another example: The CDC (in the US) can be considered trustworthy for health information, being an official government agency, but many also don’t trust it as it has become more politicised and so, biased. Again, you decide what to trust, and always consult at least two trusted sources, more is better.
For product reviews, I simply don’t pay much attention to the star rating, but instead, read the actual reviews, and sort them chronologically so I read the most recent ones. Check that they are actually reviewing the product / service you think they are, as there are ways to get good reviews then “switch” the product listing (amazon) and other similar tricks. Check if it seems plausible, level-headed, or if it’s just someone being angry, or likely fake. Like I said, it’s an art, not a science. Sometimes, you have to actually buy the product / service and judge for yourself, then compare your experience with the reviews, and you’ll learn to tell the truthful reviews from the fake or unreliable.
A tip regarding Wikipedia is to check the edit history if the last edit was made very recently since it could be spam that no one spotted yet.
I have found some pretty neat information here on Lemmy, specifically talking about Android, Firefox and Linux.
We have stuff that is not Linux, too.
I don’t know where we keep any of that, but I’m like 80% sure we have it somewhere.
Haha I felt this comment.
I seen someone suggest Lemmy’s porn is better then Voldemort’s website now. I was like, lemmy has porn?
I think once topics have labeles with multiple similar instances or something to that effect it’ll get much te organized and hopefully factual as a result. The propaganda is thick on lemmy
Dude, you had me seriously wondering what kind of Voldemort porn exists out there… I understood the reference… Too late.
I do better via DuckDuckGo than Google these days.
Even that sucks a lot of the time. Everything is superficial in scope, so it finds the same bland drivel as every other search engine. It just doesn’t have ads clogging it up.
DDG and Google both suck, but in different ways. Same is true for all other search engines I tried (Bing, Ecosia, Brave Search, Startpage). All of them have their own major downsides. For example Brave is pretty cool but is terrible at non-English search results.
Overall I still find Google the most consistent, despite all its faults.
Brave is pretty cool
It sucks that the owner is a shitbag
I use Kagi and it’s just amazing. Don’t have any problems. You can also configure Kagi to prioritize certain sites and remove others you don’t care about. Very happy with it.
The bullshit is because Google wants you to visit shitty sites because of ad revenues.
Throw them out of your life.
For how much I use search on a daily basis though, paying per search is a little too pricey
I thought the same thing, but I’ve only ever searched about 700 things per month. With better search results, you end up searching less. $10 per month is a small price to pay for the restored sanity from a working search engine.
A huge part of it is psychological. Knowing that I have to pay per use would deter me from searching or make me decide every search if this is worth using Kagi for instead of Google. The mental cost would probably be more than the financial one.
That’s understandable. They do have an unlimited option, but that is definitely in the pricey realm. I think it’s $27 a month.
I’ve tried it for a couple of days, but didn’t work for me. I’ve switched to ddg and loving it so far. Much better results than Google. Even Bing works better at work where Edge is the default browser.
I was on ddg for a while too, but found myself switching to Google sometimes with the !g syntax.
Back in the day, Wikipedia was so neutral that they had people arguing how to write articles from a non-human POV. Yes, certain articles get political, but that is when the talk page arguments, counter-arguments, and linked ARBICOM evidence pages give you a good lesson on what people think are fact and opinion. I haven’t been a editor for a while, is wikipedia not a hotbed of nerds who have to be in alignment with the facts regardless of what current political discourse says is right nowadays?
so neutral that they had people arguing how to write articles from a non-human POV.
Academics have since acknowledged the impossibility of achieving this fantasy “unbiased” perspective.
give you a good lesson on what people think are fact and opinion.
This has been such an incredible change to Wikipedia’s work, allowing dedicated spaces to talking about rhetoric and talking points for readers to learn.
facts regardless of what current political discourse says is right
Yeah, more or less. We are always free to check the sources, which is also a part of what Wikipedia nerds debate - what is the best resource to link to for those who need more info?
Again with this. Wikipedia can’t be neutral. Nothing can be. Neutral doesn’t exist.
There is absolutely no way to be “politically unbiased” when talking about things. Being “neutral” just means being in favor of the status quo, which is not neutral at all. There is no third position, you either oppose or support the way things work right now. Bias is completely inescapable.
If you want to get an “unbiased” view of something, the only real thing you can do is to read many sources biased against both outlooks and compare and contrast. What you end up with will still be biased though, just by virtue of what you select to care about and not.
People who claim to be neutral and unbiased only say it because they think it makes them look more credible, or they have deluded themselves to be able to think they’re somehow more rational than everyone else. There is no way to not be biased as a human being.
Alignment with the facts? Depends. https://quillette.com/2022/07/18/cognitive-distortions/
What I’m getting from that is:
(1) Wikipedias editors don’t want to use racists as sources for articles.
(2) The author thinks refusing to give equal time to fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence is a surrender to “woke ideology” that will kill Wikipedia in the long run.
Yawn.
“fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence” – genes influence intelligence, that’s the state of science.
I’ve always wondered how people who think the link between genes and intelligence is false explain the evolution of intelligence. I’m honestly shocked that people here in “Technology” give your comment so many upvotes. Shouldn’t we be more sciency here? Also, AI is a good example that intelligence is not independent of the material world.
Your point (1) probably gets applause because of camp thinking. Don’t let your beliefs become your identity. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxqTOm3TzsY
However, I understand that the topic is extremely uncomfortable and personally even think it should be avoided because society is not ready for it. There is still too much racism and hatred existing in society for this knowledge not to be abused. The same social immaturity also explains why currently many suspect this research to be motivated by racism.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=NxqTOm3TzsY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Well that was interesting. Useful to know I cant rely on Wikipedia any more for anything on human intelligence.
With anything controversial like this its best to go direct to the source if possible - the research itself
I just search ddg and get my results. I don’t get those affiliates, top 10 lists, or whatever you’re talking about. I just get good results, and if I don’t then I try using Google.
Another tip that basically works with all search engines. Mark a word in “quotes” to have results require that word in the page. Helps you narrow results down if you need something specific.
I do the same thing: duckduckgo for general search, Google for somewhat obscure stuff if ddg didn’t get me the results I was looking for (say, information on a specific error from a specific software programming framework).
Also you can put entire sentences in between quotes to search for that whole sentence, which is especially usefull for the above mentioned errors in specific software programming frameworks (as you can put the whole error message in between quotes to get matches on the error message itself not combinations of the words in it) and for things like expressions (say “high-side switch”) when you don’t really want as results everything which contains the individual words.
Mind you, if it gets few results with quotes Google will search without quotes so just force it to search only with quotes (you get a link on the top of the first results page for that).
I was actually surprised people kept saying they kept getting bad search results and only now because you mentioned quotes did I notice that I just search using quotes almost all of the time and have been doing so for years, so that’s probably why I get mainly decent results even from Google (though DDG is better for general search imho)
you will almost get nothing for most of the phrases in quotes
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.
Wiki
I use SearXNG to search for things, with custom redirects and block lists.
If I want a genuine human opinion on a topic, I add “site:reddit.com” to the search. Hopefully someday there will be a good way to parse the fediverse for info.
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.
