> Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes.

One of the main points of the article is you cannot rely on the brand to determine quality. The marketers know how to exploit a reputation for quality and information asymmetries to push crappy goods, for instance:

> Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

And this:

> People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

When you Google, are you reading a rave review of a 2016 bag, when the 2026 model has been crapified? Is the bag you're looking at on Amazon the Walmart JanSport or the REI JanSport?

I care and can be bothered, but Google is now itself a worse product than it used to be.

It pushes sponsors links and garbage top-ten lists with Amazon sponsored links and other seo optimized content and none of it can be trusted.

People commonly use a reddit tag to search for products, so companies started creating accounts to shill for their products there too, make it look organic and all.

You can't find the best of any product in two minutes on Google, not with any confidence.

> Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes

On what criteria are you evaluating trustworthiness? Because if you are finding it on google, you are effectively judging on SEO and marketing spend.

Sure, there are some more-or-less trustworthy review outlets, but those too often go to shit when editorial priorities change from on high (i.e. newwire cutter is a pale shadow of its former self)

Will it? How do you know?

If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.

The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:

first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and

second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.

I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.

I think Google has turned to garbage and especially for product reviews there is a flood of affiliate marketing grifters in every category. It takes effort and sometimes payment to find good reviews these days.