Consumer Reports. Since they are paid for subscriptions, they're able to afford to vet products with less influence to leave a good review.

You have to pay for quality journalism.

Do you really trust CR? In the UK we have which.co.uk, which is similar and you have to subscribe to it. But I'm fairly sure they are shilling for some of their product categories after having subscribed a few times. Like, the mattress category is filled with mattress in a box companies, which are notorious for paying off websites/blogs to promote their products. I really don't trust any of these sites anymore.

Personally I trust CR as they aren’t paid by ads but subscribers so it’s their benefit to be honest.

Exactly how I see it. They can try to double dip but as soon as someone finds out, they'll lose all their credibility.

Amazon reviews with a picture inside a dirty living room with, like, a toddler only in their diaper in the background or something have been pretty reliable.

Every Amazon review stream: 5-star, 2-star, 5-star, 5-star, 5-star, 5-star, 5-star.

>> Is there any place on the web with authentic reviews?

This is where a good social network is useful. I'd trust my friends more than any random web site. Unfortunately I don't have a huge network to call on, so it would be nice to trust my friends friends and so on, but the trust quickly drops. We need a way to improve a simple network with some user-controlled measure of authenticity and trust.

Hobby based Discords can often yield good results if you ask, and many have pinned posts in gear recommendation channels.

This is the other reason Google is failing to return good results; so much forum-type content has moved to Discord.

And Google really only has itself to blame for that, TBQH. They have had how many mediocre chat apps that they could have turned into Discord with a baked in user base over the past 15 years?

Blogs. They are very hard to find though.