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?

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    20·
    13 days ago

    Reading comments on Lemmy / Reddit mostly. I’m not looking for the top voted answer but rather the points that people mention and considering what’s important to me. If possible I also check with friends that might have purchased something similar

    Overtime I’ll use Reddit less and less, given that they’re now actively telling businesses to take advantage of that effect. Old comments are still ok, but new comments are all suspect

    https://www.business.reddit.com/

    What a mess.

    • njordomir@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      12 days ago

      That makes sense. In a recommendation thread, PIA or Nord would be the highest voted VPN, but if you read the comments and see your fellow privacy nerds talking about Mullvad, you might choose that because privacy is important to you. I also find popularity does not always corelate with quality.

  • lemmyng@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    13 days ago

    Glassdoor is not reliable. Companies can pay to suppress negative comments.

    Are there trusted impartial review sites?

    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.

    • njordomir@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      12 days ago

      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.

  • gigachad@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    13 days ago

    I used to search with site:reddit.com, but the quality of research results got much worse within the last years. For big investments like let’s say a new washing machine I use a more or less independent website that tests different devices, it costs about 5€ to see the results.

    All in all I need much, much more time to do research. Often I simply do not buy anything in the end. It is very frustrating.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
      3·
      13 days ago

      Ya and Amazon reviews are so untrustworthy now too. Sellers can ramp up ratings on products and swap out the product and keep the reviews.

    • njordomir@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      12 days ago

      This tip worked well in '22-'23 before reddit hit peak enshittification. Agreed on the time. Researching what you are getting is not as easy as it once was.