Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.
This is true. The only way I can find product buying advice is:
1. To find a community of enthusiasts and see what they have to say about products in that space. This works pretty well for products that actually have enthusiasts.
2. Go to Amazon and read a product's bad reviews. The good reviews are nearly useless. But, with bad reviews, you have to weigh the number of bad reviews against the product's popularity. If something has twelve negative reviews, that means very different things for a product that sells 10 units a month versus a product that sells 50K units a month.
3. Read the tiny handful of reliable product recommendation sites. Cool Tools, Wirecutter, annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one.
I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports and have been happy with the two purchases I made on their recommendation (headphones in the $100 range, and a new food processor).
Do you consider them compromised? It's actually just about time to renew my subscription and i've been wondering whether I should.
I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!
I used to be a subscriber. Theoretically I like CR's approach better than Wirecutters; CR purchases their products anonymous and therefore should be quite impartial and totally independent, receiving no special treatment or assistance from manufacturers.
But I found that they simply didn't update their guides nearly often enough to be useful.
Wirecutter's modern twist on CR's formula -- maintaining a frequently updated leaderboard in popular product categories, plus information on deals -- just winds up being more useful to me.
It also seems like Wirecutter has more relevant experts writing their articles. Maybe that's because they're actually better experts; maybe it just seems that way because WC articles begin with the author/authors stating their credentials and experience.
The appliances I bought using their advice has been hit/miss - ranges are decent but the fridges and dishwasher I bought are noisy and required service barely outside warranty period. These are big name brands too.
I don't necessarily fault CR but I with the hundreds of models released all slightly similar but different (I hear partly to prevent price-matching across stores) it must be as impossible to review for CR as it is for consumers to keep track of.
Also, with bad reviews, you can keep in mind if the bad reviews seem to be legitimate complaints, or whether they're just written by either someone with an axe to grind or someone who doesn't understand the purpose of the product. For example, some negative reviews of textbooks on Amazon seem to be people who are reviewing a course they took using the textbook. And some negative reviews of restaurants on Yelp seem to have wanted the restaurant to serve a different kind of food than they do.
Also also, regarding restaurant reviews: Always consider that a negative review that only calls out bad service is quite possibly a review of the reviewer more than the restaurant. Anecdotally, I've seen my share of notes of bad service for restaurants that I frequent and have never had issues. I suspect that the reviewer had at least some part to play in such issues, but conveniently leave out or drastically underplay their own contributions.
That's also good heuristic for 1. - if you're looking for a community about $obscure_topic, there's a good chance there exists reddit.com/r/$obscure_topic. Personally, I always search for a related subreddit as a first order of business when researching an unfamiliar area.
I have very mixed feelings about that. I have some serious experience there; I moderate a subreddit dedicated to audio hardware in which people often ask for and receive purchasing advice.
So on the plus side, you have some fairly knowledgeable people offering advice.
However, even your average "enthusiast" is pretty lacking. No enthusiast has experience with enough relevant speakers to really give informed recommendations. There are thousands of speakers on the market. I've used... dozens? And owned... half a dozen? I mean, nobody has direct experience with even one percent of what's on the market. We try to supplement that direct experience by staying on top of reviews and things, so we have a sense for what's popular and seems to have garnered a lot of happy owners, but it's still very conjectural.
And speakers are a product category where it is somewhat possible to own multiple products, and there is a semblance of objective measurement possible. So we have it easy.
What if you want to buy a fridge? Or silverware? Or socks? Or blankets? There probably aren't fridge enthusiasts and if there are, it's doubtful they own many fridges each. So, you wind up with users just giving anecdotal stories, tainted with heavy doses of confirmation bias, because of course people want to like the fridge they spent their cash on.
Or, worse, you get the opposite effect: brands that sell lots of volume will appear to have the highest failure rate, even if their failure rate is low. If you knew nothing about cars, or the sales volumes for various brands, combing the internets would give the impression that Corollas fail much more often than Lamborghinis. Because tales of mechanical problems for Corollas probably outnumber those for Lambos by a factor of 1,000:1. (My wife owns a Corolla! It's had a problem or two) Which would seem really damning if you didn't know that Corollas outsell Lambos probably 100,000:1 and in reality are probably an order of magnitude more reliable.
You get this effect with Apple products: any Apple-related forum has countless horror stories of failures from Apple owners. But, Apple products are actually generally reliable compared to the competition. It just so happens that they're the Corolla in this analogy, not the Lambo.
Yeah! It's pretty good IMO, are you a fan? The links are Amazon referral links (same with Wirecutter) so I still try to be heathily skeptical but I've found both to be reliable...
I just googled it. Can't say I'm a fan, I didn't even know about it. It seems very focused on home-maintenance and tools, which I know nothing about, but I'll certainly check it out in greater depth ;)
Not OP, but tbh, I thought that was more or less common practice. Many people I know do that already.
I tend to only look at 1-star reviews and 5-star reviews in passing. The first ones are obviously pissed with the product and that will colour their opinions. The latter are either enthusiasts that will love everything about it or people that heve just received it and/or are still on the honeymoon phase. I think ignoring them outright is as bad as focusing only on them, but I don't pay them too much attention.
I find that focusing on the reviews around the middle (and, of course, the number of those compared to the total number of reviews) usually gives me a better idea of the pros and cons of a product.
Actually, I don't think that is the case. I think people unwilling to pay for reviews killed reviews. Before, you had magazines and newspapers to do reviews. Since those are dying, people tried to do reviews online. Now it's hard to tell who is reviewing for real, who's reviewing for ads, who's reviewing because they're paid, etc.
Oh, this is so true. Just the other day I was thinking how hard it is to find reviews of non-tech products. I was lloking for information on a new fridge and what I came up with was useless marketing crap and what seemed like affiliate-link collections dressed up as review sites.
The Wirecutter fills this role with in-depth reviews, but their selection is limited and I prefer to have multiple sources when comparing products.
User reviews aren't helpful to me. They are very subjective, may value different attributes of a product and disappointed customers seem to have a greater incentive to broadcast their negative experience. The fact that your fridge broke down isn't necessarily representative of the product.
Another task Google is really bad at, is finding results by lyrics. As a music enthusiast and crate digger I often search for obscure, rare music I hear in sets, mixes and bootleg recordings. If there are vocals it's an obvious attempt to search for the lyrics - mostly without results. On the other hand the song I'm looking for is very likely up on Youtube, which has a surprisingly large selection of rare music uploaded by other collectors. Yet it's impossible to find those uploads by searching for the lyrics featured in them. Google should use its powers to auto-transcribe music on YouTube to lyrics. Sure, there will be a lot of mistakes, but it should be enough to give some results.
People don't search the same. For example, if I'm looking for something, I rarely use Google. Always Reddit, which will take me to a specific community with a wiki, and discussion. My Girlfriend will type something into Google, without using an Adblocker, and click on the first thing (which is always an ad), and filled with SEO garbage. I'm assuming most people search this way as well, which is why it's so lucrative.
I’m still surprised the resistance-to/wailing-about Google’s placing ads inline with search results died down as quickly as it did. It’s a total shitbag move on their part. Bottom-feeding scum behavior, right there in your face at the top of search results screens. Maybe the worst, because so effective, dark pattern on the entire web. That anyone from the company gets away with speaking in public without being shouted down by hecklers is a bad sign for tech and for society in general.
It’s the Internet equivalent of guys who go door to door selling old people driveway treatments and crappy brick façades they don’t need, at obscene markup. Preying on the least able to defend themselves. If you have any friends or relatives who aren’t “good at computers” Google tricks them for money, as a core part of their business model.
And yeah, it’s bottom-feeding scum behavior any time you see it, fit for failed used car salesmen and other low-ability scam artists. That’s the company Google workers keep, ethically speaking. Could be worse, but still bad enough you don’t want them near your kids or grandparents.
It's amazing how between reviews, sellers, features, and availability, when I make a google (or DDG) search of some product none of the links are of the kind that I want.
I've gave up googling for products I intend to buy (what has probably the largest revenue potential).
I swear the last five years or more of searching for products lead to the first two pages being fake reviews/ads. Google must make money from this otherwise they would fix it.
Google for any game, and then check which of the articles doesn't just copy its enture text, images, and score from the stuff on the press server.
If you have access to, say, the bethesda press ftp, and compare the material there to any review of the games, you'll see that over 90% just copy-pasted without writing much themselves.
It's all fake.
Oh, and those that don't copy-paste often still review everything positively, because otherwise they won't get games before release anymore.
That explains why every BioShock review I read back in the day seemed like it had been written by the same person. Suddenly, everyone were talking about protagonists and antagonists in their game-reviews.
Consumer reports was first but it's an ad - I should have stated I stopped using Google five years ago because it was so full of spam but now at least #3/#7/#12 are relevant and the rest are still ads and spam sites for me.
It's also useless for finding specific product information.
I was trying to find troubleshooting advice for a particular model of printer and no matter what keywords or modifiers I tried all the results were for low-quality shopping or review sites. Impossible to find actual information over the flood of SEO 'content'.
I agree, totally. I used to wonder why I'd find reviews that feel like they are trying to "sell" me something instead of providing an honest review. It's extremely frustrating and seems to be more and more of an issue (thinking back to the HN thread a month ago - The war to sell you a mattress).
The company became interested in the topic because a competitor was training their affiliates to write fake reviews of the company's product as a bait-and-switch tactic. (They later did a study with methodology that showed their product does a 33X better job at enabling individuals to create high-traffic sites.)
Some of the worst niches, I’ve noticed, are those that have the potential to prey on people due to the nature of needs - health, make money online, pain relief, weight loss. If you can find a fair review when searching on product reviews, it’s pure luck.
I imagine that Google’s AI component of the algorithm should eventually be able to recognize and penalize reviews that actually do the customer a disservice. Until then, some of the suggestions in this thread are excellent.
Google is excellent at giving the appearance of finding everything. The fact that there is an enormous world of which Google remains completely ignorant is a fact of which we seem increasingly unapprised.
Have you never noticed that all the really good sites you 'find' have been because someone posted the link? For example in a comment on HN, or reddit. Or a related link on Wikipedia or the sidebar of a subreddit?
That to an extent, and also the fact that _real_ artificial intelligence - the kind that you could share exactly where you're up to with programming and it could tell you exactly what site to read next - that doesn't exist yet.
I once read that Google indexes 0.5% of everything publicly known.
Once I found very nice forum about linux servers. I found it thanks to my friend saying I have to check it out. After spending some time there this forum started to showing up on first page of google every time I looked some solution for my server problem. Google is closing your in your own bubble. It will present to you websites that you already know or that are related to sites that you know.
> Google is closing you in your own bubble. It will present to you websites that you already know or that are related to sites that you know.
This is a good explanation for why my friends search results are very different from mine. Google would spin this as individualization.
Is there any way to get around this bubble and unearth fresh results each search ??
Have you tried incognito mode? I also recall there was option to turn off customizing search results (or something similar) in google's privacy settings.
EDIT: I did not notice any differences so I don't really know how to test it. I search highly technical stuff for work or very mundane "popular" things outside of it. Seems like I'm bad target for the customization.
I do historical research in the context of legal work, and for that Hein Online is pretty good. It’ll have old copies of speeches given in Congress, contemporaneous articles, and that sort of thing. It also has tons of old articles and research papers in the social sciences. ProQuest is indispensible for more modern stuff. If you’ve got a Library of Congress card, many of these resources are free.
A lot of stuff just isn’t online. For one case I needed to look through a bunch of 19th-early 20th century rail and telegraph tariffs. These were generally published in booklets, but they were commercial materials so the Library of Congress doesn’t have many examples. But EBay did!
As a millennial I fall into the trap of thinking if it’s not Google it doesn’t exist. But the traditional methods your librarian taught you are still highly relevant even today.
I highly, highly recommend Thomas Mann -- The Oxford Guide to Library Research.
There are all kinds of cool reference works out there. And Mann has a striking criticism of the impoverished, dumbed-down search interface that's ubiquitous now: the search box.
