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.
I used DDG for a few years, but now I can’t stand it anymore. The search results are so bad. I could scroll to the end of the results and not find a single website I’d trust enough to cite as a reliable source. It’s all irrelevant SEO trash.
Also, search syntax doesn’t work! I could do the ol’ site:reddit trick, but - would never exclude results with a term, “” would never guarantee results with a term, and + sure as hell didn’t work either.
I reluctantly switched to Brave. The search results are better, but I don’t trust it very much since it started redirecting image searches to Bing or Google. I will likely move to Kagi.
Yeah, its gotten progressively worse. I tried setting up my own install of SearX but that just means I get trash results from all of the things.