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?
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!
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.
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.
That looks cool! Saved. What apps could do the redirect? Would that be possible with an extension? That would be awesome.
Libredirect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
Bonus : https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy
That libredirect plugin is awesome! Just tried it quickly on Quora and that works.
Should also be said that for various edge cases where a extension doesn’t exist, uBlock’s element selector function lets you get very granular with filtering things. If you know a bit of html/css, you can get creative with it and consistently hide just about any element you like across many different sites.
For example, recently I’ve been on a quest to de-rating all my favorite media sites and Google results, etc. No more wayward rotten tomatoes, metacritic, or imbd scores when I want to look up info on media unless I go looking for them on those websites. No addon that I’m aware of exists solely for this purpose, so I’m basically using uBlock to do it by using the element selector any time I see them. Some sites make this tricky, and any adjustment to the design of the page could break it, but the joy I get from being able to curate my web experience to exactly what I want to it to be can’t be understated.
Using uBlock to block-element to block a prompt asking me to disable my ad blocker is one of the best feelings ever.
There’s a list for that I believe
I wish kbin had a save feature; I’m replying so I can find this later 😆
On lemmy, you can click on the little … at the bottom of the post and save bookmarks of posts and replies :)
You can always bookmark the direct link to this post :')
If you’re on mobile I suggest using Pocket app to save interesting links, you can find the Android version here and iOS version here.
I like Ghostery too. It blocks cookies and trackers so I can just search for something without being bombarded by ads for it later.
Saving this comment. Thanks!
That is an amazing list of helpful extensions, THANK YOU!
Thanks! Was looking for useful extensions. Saved!
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? I should ignore ad content?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.