Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want.

I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.

FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.

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Den_VR 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Search engines were good at this, before the Internet optimized for it. Once the the Internet optimizes for ai search, it too will go the same way

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Gareth321 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Search optimisation is deterministic. The algorithms are quite sophisticated but even an older LLM can easily work around them right now. There will be some kind of AI arms race but I think the net effect of that will destroy search as a platform. What arises from the ashes? I can only speculate. Possibly distributed search. Possibly something like torrent swarms. uTorrent's distributed search has been available for decades and it's surprisingly resilient. Possibly something like I2P or Tor. Possibly AI agents creating amorphous and transient search tasks/communities. Even in these early days it's possible to cobble together hobby search engines using various sources for cheap/free.

I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.

	▲	megagpt4 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Generative engine optimisation is a separate field. Websites that are SEO aren't necessarily GEO, they're having to be reoptimized for that. One strategy is to post fake conversations onto Reddit, where one bot how to do something, and another bot says the best way is with the product being optimised. LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.

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stereolambda an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.