Technology

Research journals along with a university based Library search engine to find them.

If I want a useful ad, I just wait on instagram to spy on me and actually give me good local ads that are useful

I've actually gone back to the old way, find a realiable site or publication and then add my links to the browser, very old school but still absoultely relevant. Also, since llm are a thing, i use the for extra searches with things like perplexity ai. I also appreciate chronological feeds, so that i am the one to pick and choose what to see and not some automated system that i don't truly trust. With some exceptions, clearly.

And everyone gave me shit for keeping my feedly account.

The Reader died, but the feeds do live on, between mastodon, lemmy and feedly I got plenty to read.

I use Kagi.com as a search engine.

For products I'll immediately start with Project Farm on YouTube and see if he's covered the thing I'm interested in. If he hasn't I'll try /r/buyitforlife. I'll look on multiple sites of retailers I've heard of for reviews of products from a manufacturer I've heard of (no "WEEJIANGBEST" on Amazon) and give conditional trust to ratings averaged from 3000 or more individual reviews. If I'm feeling wildly thorough I might visit Fakespot to vet those reviews. If the product is expensive, I might pay for a month of access to Consumer Reports. If it's really expensive, I will pay for Consumer Reports.

For services, those are local to me, so I tend to rely on fuzzy word-of-mouth stuff. I might look in the subreddit for my city, but tend more toward simply knowing the reputation of what's around me.

Edit: for local businesses, I also look them up on the Better Business Bureau.

Interesting, was the timing and community chosen for this query better than mine a couple days ago? Regardless, this post provides me more responses to a similar question to sort through, so no complaints here!

The internet used to be about people sharing what they know for free to help others and it became a WINNER TAKE ALL kind of internet. There are no blog, article, reviews, that are not fake anymore, you can buy each one of these services, even search results can be bought. Google, Duckduckgo, Bing, Kagi, are all the same shit different smell, the results are not relevant anymore, the only thing that makes them different is the browser extension you run to block the spyware, tracking, and surveillance on your every click, data that gets sold by your ISP, Social media, and every site you visit, not unless you are blocking that info between your browser and the site you visit - which is doable with a lot of browser extensions.

Honestly, niche YouTube channels. The problem is sometimes you don't want to sit through a 30-45 minute video to find the information you're after.

Brave search seems marginally better than others.

I used to frequent searchlores.org and fravia.com back in the day, they were a treasure trove of specialised web search and data mining techniques.

UNSW maintain a mirror of the old websites, last updated 14 years ago, worth a look if you have some time on your hands.

http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm