Hello fellow lemmings,
I was a wiz at google in the early 2000s. I would find obscure forums for every interest and usually get some pretty good info. My research skills haven’t aged well, and I’d like to get a bit more with it.
I use:
- Rtings, for TVs and monitors
- Consumer reports, for <500
- Sites like scamreport where people rant about shitty companies not living up to their promises
- glassdoor, to see what a company’s employees think and how they are treated
How do you research your purchases when there is so much AI slop out there and google doesn’t really work right anymore. Duck duck go and bing are marginally better. Are there trusted impartial review sites?
Glassdoor is not reliable. Companies can pay to suppress negative comments.
They exist, but are very few - their articles get stolen by unscrupulous copycats, or the AI slop buries them in noise. It’s like panning for gold, but instead of a bubbling creek it’s sewage runoff. I hardly ever find trustworthy results on the first page any more, you got to go several pages deep until you stop seeing the “Top N <search term> you absolutely need to buy!” results.
I know Glassdoor has issues. I didn’t know they allowed suppression of comments. I imagine a former employer of mine would have gladly paid $$$ to fix their 1.7* rating rather than actually pay us more so we could actually give them a higher rating. Instead they had new hires rate the place highly before they got dumped into the live operation. Still one of the lower ranked companies on Glassdoor.
I found a few similar sites that seem more “pure”, but they really only work for the tech industry.
I agree with you about the torrent of sewage. Its hard to find good data. Honestly, a 1yr pre-enshittification reddit dataset searched with Ctrl+F is likely better at answering many questions than today’s google search.