Tips for web searching for reviews? How to avoid the crap?

[niels007]

Hi all,

It used to be easy. Type the name of the thing you want info about, add 'review' and click 'search'.. You'd find the Tomshardware review of the device, and / or a load of other true reviews.

Since a few years however, typing something like 'Canon printer review' gives you about 10.000 'product compare / price seeking / user review' sites in 20 languages, none of which being what you actually want to read.

99 out of 100 times those sites will say something like: "Be the first to review the Canon Printer".. And even if customers left some review, its always too sparse and even less trustworthy than a 'proper' review..

How do the SPCR buffs go about finding *good* product info and usable reviews online?

Curious if there are any tips..

/Niels

[MikeC]

I presume you're talking about computer related stuff...

• You could try searching for reviews at sites you already know (and trust?).
• If you have a product in mind, you can always go to its web site and look for review links.
• Some shopping engines have links to "pro" reviews. Like this -- see the link to the SPCR review under "expert review" on the top right.

[Maelwys]

I find it best to search for specific product numbers nowadays. And often it's good to leave off any extra letters and tags on the model number so you can get multinational versions of the same product. As an example, when searching for a review for the Canon printer I wanted to buy recently, instead of looking for 'canon printer reviews' I looked for 'canon pixma 6700 review'.

Another thing I'll use sometimes is something like 'canon pixma roundup' to see if someone has reviewed something as part of a larger roundup of products.

[matt_garman]

It used to be easy. Type the name of the thing you want info about, add 'review' and click 'search'.. You'd find the Tomshardware review of the device, and / or a load of other true reviews.

...

How do the SPCR buffs go about finding *good* product info and usable reviews online?

You definitely have to do a bit more work these days, that's for sure. Have you noticed that newegg's customer reviews often end up at the top of your google searches? As fun as those are to read, like you said, I wouldn't call those "proper" reviews.

Anyway, I usually try to add the "site:" parameter to my google searches. Using your example above, you could type something like this into the google search form:

Code: Select all

intel bad axe 2 site:tomshardware.com

That would limit Google's search to only the tomshardware.com domain.

Of course, if there's a new review site or some other random gem, you'll miss it. But fortunately, with sites like anandtech (and even our own SPCR), there's usually a forum discussion that follows a review, which can help you track down those other (potentially) interesting info tidbits.

[Arvo]

I usually include some technical words into query, like "xxxxxx review temperature voltage" - shopping sites do not contain [many] technical terms. Of course I have 100 results per page limit set in google, this way usually one-two usable links are already on first page

What about NewEgg comments - these are actually valuable for me. If some product has about 20 or more reviews then product stability issues and common problems are already clear from these.
Tomshardware and other good reviews often do not contain such data.

[Devonavar]

I find that the spam results that you refer to are generally symptomatic of a product that doesn't HAVE any "proper" reviews. Google is usually pretty good about listing proper reviews first so long as they exist.

If I'm having trouble finding reviews, I generally go to the manufacturer's site; most major manufacturers have review lists for all of their products. Any company that is reasonably marketing savvy will recognize the value of linking to product reviews. That said, this can lead to issues of bias, since bad reviews don't necessarily get linked to, but it is a good starting point.