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Comment by tpetry | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it is really horrible: Years ago you could google specific products or product categorizes to find meaningfully reviews to choose the „best“ product. Nowadays google is filled with shop listings (for specific products) and listings of some products with amazon referral links. The review part is completely gone.

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Agreed. Unfortunately, as useful as it used to be I tend to not use Search Engines at all anymore. I've had to return to the days of old where SE's didn't exist in any useful capacity, and bookmark everything of value. It's filtered out all of the crap I used to have to wade through though. My only regret is that I don't see much outside of the regular websites I visit anymore, but Google was becoming less of a useful place to find new content anyway and I'm more receptive to finding new quality websites via Reddit or HN now.

One interesting thing I have seen is when I search for a product review, google suggests I add "reddit" to the end of my search. And this conststantly gives me better results but its not long until reddit is completely full of shills which it partly already is.

That's interesting because I frequently add Reddit to the end of my searches. Particularly when it's a niche topic and increasingly for regular topics. Apparently a lot of other people who are fed up with search engines had the same idea. It's a very unfortunate development but nowadays Google search is almost unusable for some topics.

Music reviews on Amazon were a dream back in 2008 or so. Far from the pretentious babble on Pitchfork and sites of that ilk, you could get concise, single paragraph reviews from regular people trying to explain what they liked/didn't like on the record.

Those days are long gone, since everybody streams now, and genuine user reviews have dried up. Last.fm was another great site, but it's a ghost town now, and the band comments sections are full of spam.

At least rateyourmusic.com is still chugging along.

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