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Comment by firefoxd | Hacker News Reader

The majority of times when i search on google I'm looking for someone's personal take on a matter. Whether it's a software recommendation or alternative, a recipe, or experience with a tool. Google only has listicles, top x, or best in 202x.

I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want.

It doesn't help that recent trend of developers building their content website with react and such, have no little to no concept of SEO.

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Because of widespread spam, astroturfing, hidden shilling, and soon generative AI, there is no way to tell whether something written on the internet was actually someone's personal take or whether it is paid for. I'd argue there's no web forum or social media site anywhere where you can reliably say "this was posted by an actual human and was not paid for."

Sam Altman’s worldcoin and world ID would solve this

I've been looking recently for an opinion article on the Tailwind CSS framework, ideally listing its benefits, drawbacks, long-term maintenance considerations etc. There appears to be absolutely no way to find this type of information on Google these days.

I think it depends on the topic. On technical / software questions I do still find individual websites and blogs. For something like product reviews, my experience is exactly like yours and the only thing that shows up is the trash you mentioned.

I don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory at play, and that there just isn't anything valuable to show!

People who would (in the past) run their own website or blog now post that same content on social media, which is why Reddit has become mandatory for people looking for genuine opinions.

> I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query.

Google certainly omits quite a lot, though. Especially smaller sites run by actual people.

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