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by esperent 1556 days ago
So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.

So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.

Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.

Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?

Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.

2 comments

The problem with reddit is that the comments there could also be ads, and it's harder to tell.
Ranking results by author's credibility (site karma) could help, at least for the time being.

It's not that the comments are plain ads (these will be easy for the reader to discern), it's dishonest product reviews. It's an unsolved problem in e-commerce websites and even in real life.

Tho marketers are slowly catching on to this with product placements on Reddit.