Comment by miki123211
2 years ago
> third-party specialist review sites
Are there any that you can recommend? Google seems very unreliable in that department these days, it's very hard to say which reviews are honest and which ones are basically ads. There's also the additional complication that some sites that try to be honest receive products from manufacturers, which limits what they can say to keep their manufacturer relationships going.
It's nearly impossible to find, because even the "supposed good" third party sites are just amazon referral link farms these days.
More and more I've taken to just checking what Costco sells, and if Target or Walmart (or other "big, real stores") are willing to ship and sell it themselves.
Kagi is pretty good at surfacing high quality third-party reviews. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
wirecutter
Also, google "best [item] reddit"
The second suggestion might work, but Wirecutter’s recommendations have sucked more and more after they got bought by NYT. Sometimes they don’t even test the stuff they recommend: they just go by Amazon reviews and what other sites say. Other times their recommendations are just bogus: their “cheap” wifi6 router was a nightmare for me, basically $120 thrown to the trash (well no, the first unit sucked and failed so I returned it but since it was a failure they just sent me a new one back with no way to get a refund, so the new unit is still in its box in my basement; I got a decent router based on someone else’s recommendation).