this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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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?

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[–] Sterile_Technique 144 points 10 months ago (16 children)

Extensions help a ton. Some of my favorites:

Block or Highlight Search Engine Results - Does what the name says. When you run a search on Google or DDG or whatever engine you use, and you get a result from a shit website, add it to the filter and you'll never see that trash again. I filter out the following trash: chegg, timesmojo, coursehero, numerade, forbes, instagram, and pinterest. I've only been using this one for a little bit, so I expect that list will grow a LOT, but even with just those removed from my search results, HOLY HELL has the quality of my searches has increased. This one is probably the most relevant to OP's question.

Dictionary Anywhere - For vocab. Double-click any word on the web, and a little text bubble pops up with its definition - works on words in that bubble too, for when you run into shit like "Redundancy: the state of being redundant." -_- double click the "redundant" in the bubble to get a second bubble with a more useful definition. (doesn't happen often, but it's a cool feature, so worth calling out)

Fandom Enhance - For videogames, since every game wiki is on Fandom for some reason. This extension scrubs a LOT of the unnecessary clutter from the page.

Recipe Filter - Works with recipe websites. Scrubs out the 528 page life story from the author and reduces it down to just "Grilled cheese: bread, cheese, butter. Put butter on two pieces of bread. Put a slice of cheese in between. Put it on a griddle at 250 degrees for 2 mins. Flip it over, two more mins. Eat that sum' bitch." ✔

Youtube-shorts block. Youtube shorts NEVER have good content - get that TikTok shit outa here.

uBlock Origin - This one's a HEAVY lifter for taking the trash out of the internet. This will improve both the quality of information on screen by removing a TON of sketchy shit, and make your browsing a lot safer by filtering out malicious links. If you're not already using uBlock and take nothing else from this post, TAKE THIS ONE.

...that's pretty much it on my end, but there's a lot of other useful extensions out there. If anyone else has one to add, by all means let's keep this ball rolling!

[–] Lakija 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well damn. Thank you. Saving this! I have Ublock origin already. I’m excited about the other suggestions too!

Pinterest is half the fucking google image search. Bye! And the other half is shopping ads. Google can kiss my grits.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Use alternative front-end ends of the popular sites such as youtube , Twitter, medium , Google,etc you use to get a privacy enhanced, ad free, clutter free experience.

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

There's apps that can automatically redirect you to these alternative whenever you encounter their counterpart.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That looks cool! Saved. What apps could do the redirect? Would that be possible with an extension? That would be awesome.

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