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How do people find good information on the internet these days? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by catch22@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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?

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[–] regalia@literature.cafe 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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)

[–] mystic@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago

you will almost get nothing for most of the phrases in quotes