What search engine do you use? What terms might you use to filter out junk?
Over the past few years I’ve gotten into the habit of using Google and reddit for general information. When searching I append “reddit” to the terms and tend to get good results. Without appendjng I often don’t get back anything relevant. It sort of works if I’m searching for a particular product or company by name but doesn’t show me relevant reviews or guides. For something not by name it is just a ton of blog spam and useless articles.
Sometimes YouTube can have reviews but with the way content creation works I have reason to take positive reviews with a grain of salt most of the time. For review sites or reviews on stores I just assume 95% are not/paid.
I have had some success appending something for particular sites. Way more specific to a topic though like board game geek or stack overflow. I’ve tried “forum” but that doesn’t seem to do much.
Edit:
People seem to mostly be suggesting things like DuckDuckGo. There is also a paid option that seems like it could be effective, Kagi.
Also this exists.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
Paid search will be a tough sell for a lot of people. I do get why “free” search can lead to problems.
Yeah, I totally get that. Made me feel a little unwell at the beginning as well, but considering that search is one of the main, key features I use daily, multiple times, it is totally worth it.
I pay for a search engine, because:
Hnngghh, no bot-generated SEO trash is a good reason for me to spend my money…