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?
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.
It's already breaking.
Some stuff just links to deleted comments
Newer stuff is just crap since a lot of knowledge has left the site