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?
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.
It sucks that the owner is a shitbag