These are all monetized results. Brands send bikes to these places to review. It's an advertisement. If you want an organic result like a personal blog post from someone or a niche interest forum like you might have found on google search 15 years ago or so, it's just not really there. Everything you see has been paid for to be seen by you. Once you realize that, a lot of the web feel like this uncanny potemkin internet because that's all it really is these days.

You're not going to find people doing unpaid work reviewing the best exercise bikes, or other expensive items. Very few people can afford to go out and buy 10-20 exercise bikes, and fewer still people can afford to do so every time a new bike is released. And yet fewer will then go and write up their experiences and keep their list updated over time.

For stuff like this you will only get spec comparison articles or comparison articles from big sites who get gear sent to them or make so much from affiliate sales that they can afford to rent/buy gear. It's simply not likely for anyone to put so much time and effort into it for a passion project.

However, where you can still find independent reviews is if you look up a specific item. Granted, they may still put an affiliate link in, because why not try to make some money when you've put in the work of making a good review, but at least they'll have bought the gear themselves and are using it because it's what they like best, and can speak to the pros and cons of the equipment in detail.

So the big lists are still useful - check out a couple "top 10" lists, read the specs, and get an idea of what's suitable. Then look up the promising candidates individually, and find more "real" content about them. I find this usually gives results which are better than just reading Reddit discussions, at least for higher value items.

it doesn't have to be a single person that reviews all bikes. We can crowdsource this a la IMDb. But it does seem like a myth that there was ever, in history, a good way to answer the question of "best exercise bike". Google's current inability to answer the question isn't new.

The challenge with that is avoiding companies manipulating results. IMDB works reasonably well with thousands of people going on and rating any given movie - it's harder for a company to mess with those ratings because they'd need a lot of accounts. Plus there's no real incentive to - people don't just go and watch the highest rated movie, they watch multiple movies and often don't even care about the ratings if it has an actor they like or is in their favourite genre or whatever.

With something like exercise bikes, the calculus changes. You're going to have much fewer ratings, and people tend to only buy one bike every 10+ years, and they'll want to buy the best one they can afford. Now there's a real incentive for a company to manipulate the ratings, and it's also much easier to do so.

I totally agree though that the current inability to answer the question isn't new. And I don't think that will change - I don't really see a viable alternative to the current situation. But if someone comes up with one then I'll be very excited to see it, as the current approach of using lists from big sites to go find higher-quality reviews from smaller sites is not the most efficient. But maybe that's not the worst thing - I like that there's still value to small independent reviewers.

> Google's current inability to answer the question isn't new.

IMO this is true.

It used to be however that the search results contained the phrase you looked for. This was later I think revised to also include pages that had links with the text in question pointing to them.

This kind of made sense for some queries (opinion based?), but for other queries (looking for technical content) it is actively harmful as it drowns out every useful site.

Four years old now, but here's a good long read on how an entire industry's review sites may be acquired or strongarmed into being invisible shills: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

Yeah if you ask a real person with experience they'd probably say check used sites like ebay or gumtree as people buy the machines, get bored, use them as coat racks for a couple of years and then sell them second hand for 10% of the new price.

Oh yeah, and that's why a handful of subreddits are still good resources. You go in and ask "what's the best exercise bike" and the top comment will say "just buy used locally."