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've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!
It can be a bit behind on the far changing stuff like electronics, and it can be pricey.
But I've never found them lacking in quality and detail.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365
Typical cartel-like, profit-boosting activity of oligopolies which appliance market seems to be with a handful of companies owning most brands.
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.
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.
Recommend the BIFL (buy it for life) community on Reddit.
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.
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.
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.
So, if you see it, then...
I've gave up googling for products I intend to buy (what has probably the largest revenue potential).
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.
washing machine quiet
and 75% of the matches are ads.
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.
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'.
This is an interesting series on fake reviews: http://www.sitesell.com/blog/2017/07/fake-reviews.html
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.
Hope you find the link useful.
I once read that Google indexes 0.5% of everything publicly known.
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 ??
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.
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.
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.