If I want a useful ad, I just wait on instagram to spy on me and actually give me good local ads that are useful

Research journals along with a university based Library search engine to find them.

And everyone gave me shit for keeping my feedly account.

The Reader died, but the feeds do live on, between mastodon, lemmy and feedly I got plenty to read.

Have good filters for all the crap and use search engines with modifiers. What’s a subject or thing you’ve struggled to research so I can see if I have the same issue?

Honestly, niche YouTube channels. The problem is sometimes you don't want to sit through a 30-45 minute video to find the information you're after.

The internet used to be about people sharing what they know for free to help others and it became a WINNER TAKE ALL kind of internet. There are no blog, article, reviews, that are not fake anymore, you can buy each one of these services, even search results can be bought. Google, Duckduckgo, Bing, Kagi, are all the same shit different smell, the results are not relevant anymore, the only thing that makes them different is the browser extension you run to block the spyware, tracking, and surveillance on your every click, data that gets sold by your ISP, Social media, and every site you visit, not unless you are blocking that info between your browser and the site you visit - which is doable with a lot of browser extensions.

Interesting, was the timing and community chosen for this query better than mine a couple days ago? Regardless, this post provides me more responses to a similar question to sort through, so no complaints here!

I used to frequent searchlores.org and fravia.com back in the day, they were a treasure trove of specialised web search and data mining techniques.

UNSW maintain a mirror of the old websites, last updated 14 years ago, worth a look if you have some time on your hands.

http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm

Brave search seems marginally better than others.