Do you have some methods to mitigate the downsides of search engines and “AI” summarizers? Besides talking to folks online, what other methods might one use to sift through the internet’s vast expanses?

Not that I mind the last option, but for any of us to be able to provide each other novel information that we couldn’t otherwise search, it seems like there must be some other way to find info that one hasn’t produced or compiled themselves.

Edit:
For a more recent & livelier discussion of a similar topic, see this thread.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    132·
    10 months ago

    Man, back in the day, Google would search for what you typed and nothing else. You could put in whatever words you wanted and it would give you back results with those words and only those words. If you wanted to search only for a literal phrase (where the words you provided appeared consecutively and in the order you gave them) you’d put them in quotes. And Google never strayed from your exact instructions.

    Those were good days. I don’t think that’s a thing any more.

    I use DuckDuckGo today, but it sells your info to Microsoft, apparently, so I’m not sure it’s really much better than Bing or Google on that score. And the search results are probably objectively worse.

    Let’s burn the internet to the ground and start over.