Things You'll Need:
- A fast internet connection.
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Step 1
Consumer Reports may be the most unbiased source of product reviews***Consumer Reports*** Probably the most well known, trusted and respected source of product reviews is Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports tries very hard to be unbiased and does not accept advertising dollars which might corrupt it's process. Nevertheless as maybe shown by their across the board favoring of Apple products they may have favorites which not completely justified. The con of Consumer Reports is it cost $26.95 per year for nonsubscribers to the magazine and $19.00 for subscribers.
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Step 2
Top 10 Reviews provides an excellent easy to use format for its reviews.***Top Ten Reviews*** A relative newcomer to the game, Top Ten Reviews is another general review site taking a comprehensive Consumer Reports like approach and not just reviewing computers and electronics. They even rate movies. The best part of Top Ten Reviews besides being free, is their easy to understand and digest format: an ordered top ten products in each field. Additionally they have charts showing which products in the top 10 have well chosen key features. Furthermore there are more in depth review articles about each product that makes it in the top 10. Their choices appear to be in general line with my impressions of what is best.
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Step 3
Consumer Search provides free well balanced aggregations of reviews***Consumer Search*** Consumersearch is another relative newcomer. The strength of Consumersearch is that it is an aggregator of reviews about products. It is convincingly written in a tone similar to Consumer Reports and uses Consumer Reports prominently in its reviews. Also it's free. Consumersearch uses also uses information from user submitted review sites, like Amazon. Finally the site features information from the more hard to find blog reviews of products too. One gets the impression of well balanced non-commercial opinions here.
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Step 4
Amazon probably has the most widely used user submitted reviews***Consumer Submitted Reviews*** The biggest player in this field is Amazon. With the recent revelation that Belkin employees were flooding Amazon's site with positive reviews about their products, the whole honesty of the review process has been thrown into question. Apparently companies doing this may be more widespread. One of the problems with Amazon Reviews is that you don't have to prove you purchased the reviewed item from Amazon, to rate it. If only purchasers could review products, the barrier to dishonest reviews might be a little higher. In addition to Amazon many other sites have effectively used Customer Reviews as part of their sites, including Staples, New Egg and Walmart. This has almost become an indispensable part of online retail sites. However since the reviews are in control of the retailers perhaps the ratings should be taken with a grain of salt, since the temptation to skew the results in favor of short term economics may be overwhelming. New Egg Reviews are particularly helpful for software and computer hardware and appear generally unbiased.
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Step 5
ZDNet and its sister site CNET are valauable sources of both editor and user reviews in one place***Computer Magazines and Websites*** The big player in this field is CNET and it sister site ZDNet. The strength of these two sites are the editors rate computer products on a 5 star scale, but also include user ratings on the same scale. The user reviews appear to be often numerous and candid. Thus one can identify good popular products that the editors may have overlooked because of their more formal methods of rating and shorter term use. Three other useful sites are PC Magazine, PC Word and Computer Shopper. All are high quality and editor driven review sites. PC Magazine also provides nominal user ratings although they are not emphasized.
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Step 6
Epinion was a pioneer in providing user submitted reviews on the Web and still is a valuable source especially for historical reviews.***Blogs and Other Review Sources*** Blogs are a valuable source of reviews. Big ones include Lifehacker, Endgadget, Downloadsquad and many others. To find such reviews type in Google or Yahoo "Reviews of *" replacing the asterisk with the product desired like say "multifunction printers." Another good source of reviews not widely used are those found in Google's Shopping search engine. After locating an item, the rating will appear in the lower left corner out of 5 stars. If one clicks on the stars a page will be displayed showing both editor and user reviews in one place. This feature is certainly underutilized. An older player Epinions was a founder of online reviews. It may still be a useful site to check out as it has a large database of historical reviews.
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Step 7
***Star Review*** Here's a new find for me, Star Reviews! http://www.starreviews.com/
