[medstrom]

At risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, think back to how you would've browsed the internet before Google. You probably would've grown your own web-directory of bookmarks, right? That's also how you explore the non-SEO-paved parts of the internet now.

I haven't learned to find product reviews yet, but I imagine that a trick would be to know which forums to go for certain kinds of products, e.g. maybe https://xdaforums.com/ for Android devices.

There is also the search engine https://boardreader.com/ which ONLY searches proper forums--sometimes you find neat threads, sometimes not.

[dns_snek]

Forums are a good one, but they're surprisingly hard to find these days. It really feels like we're back to word of mouth again.

This boardreader search engine sounds promising though! I'll give that a try next time I'm shopping in an unfamiliar market.

[wyclif]

I used AltaVista.