Slate: Digging for Googleholes.

If you’re searching for something that can be sold online, Google’s top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information...

The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you’ll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn’t appear in an online catalog.

Running into this problem myself, I’ve sometimes wished for a “comments-only” search option, to only show me unofficial information. The official information is always just copies of the same thing. Google Groups comes close, but it misses the vast majority of discussions nowadays, which tend to happen on web-based forums and review sites.

This idea comes surprisingly close to Andrew Orlowski’s blog-separation fixation.