Google useless for shopping / product reviews?

Yes, it's about as useless as relying on Amazon reviews.

Affiliate marketing and SEO optimization have pretty much destroyed the usefulness of searching for product reviews.

I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people think about something.

I wish Google had a way to "downvote" results. Sure they would have to mitigate artificial manipulation, but what they have currently doesn't work well.

I've been experimenting with https://kagi.com/.

For technical questions, they prioritize official documentation and SO. They don't serve you all those copy-pasta blogs that plague Google results.

For product reviews, they prioritize reddit and other forums by default. It's still far from perfect, but at least they're trying.

It's a Catch-22 - Any service trusted by consumers will inevitably be targeted by malicious actors. The ones cited as potentially "better" are generally too small to matter, hence they have not yet been targeted in a significant way.

Reddit or (a very small number of) youtubers are pretty much the only sources of truthful and good-faith product reviews. Almost all of my recent purchases are due to recommendations by hobbyist subreddits like r/mechanicalkeyboards, r/photography, r/bifl, etc.

Google automated ranking, using totally random pagerank algos, which was their downfall. Reddit and youtube, in general, rely on crowdsourced ranking, which is harder to game (not impossible).

With Google, I often struggle to even find the official manufacturer’s website.

Yes, Google is just SPAM now. Kinda like Amazon.

In Germany, there is test.de which is funded by its subscribers. They tend to do pretty objective reviews (but in German).

There has to be an incentive for someone to write an authoritative and unbiased list in order for such a list to surface via web search. For the two examples you give, it's just not going to happen. For other products, I agree with the frustration but, again, who is going to provide this information for no reward?

I'm no apologist for Google but I'd be willing to bet that if you wrote such a list and it was truly authoritative and unbiased then it would be very easy to find.

This is where "real life" is helpful. Ask other people who use these things which one they like. People at the dog park, salespeople at well-curated pet stores for the dog scissors and other people who like hot sauce or gourmet cooking stores for the same. Coworkers, friends of friends, etc. If you don't interact with others for whatever reason, look on large retailer sites for reviews - and read the bad ones. Sometimes a common problem with the product will be commented on a few times. Well known/established brands can be a guide (vs no name garbage from amazon/china).

Search engines are pretty useless these days - any answer I'm looking for regarding anything is not found and instead I get AI/bot pulling non-answers/keyword driven paragraphs into a click seeking website.

At some point what could have been a great tool was taken over by capitalism and adtech. It's a shame.

Try Youtube. There are affiliate links there too but not as much.

Reviews in general are not reliable. I have been paid about a dozen times/offered the item for free to write a positive Amazon review about some product.