How buying guides are researched

The honest version: I read specifications, I read a lot of public reviews, and I reason about the category. There is no product lab here.

What I actually do

1. Define the reader's problem narrowly. Not "best desk lamp" but "a lamp for evening work at a small desk in a rented room". The narrow version is what makes a recommendation useful.
2. Work out what decides the category. Usually three or four specifications determine whether something solves that problem. The rest is marketing.
3. Gather evidence. Manufacturer specifications for facts, patterns across publicly available customer reviews for reliability signals, and independent measurements where a publication that actually tests has published them.
4. Label which is which. On the page, a specification is labelled a specification, a review pattern is labelled a review pattern, and my judgement is labelled as mine.
5. Say who it's wrong for. Every recommendation gets a real drawback and a "skip this if". A guide with no drawbacks is an advertisement.
6. Date it. The page records when links and availability were last checked.

What I don't do

• Claim hands-on testing that didn't happen.
• Print prices, discounts, star ratings, Prime status or stock levels. They're wrong within a week, and Amazon's terms don't permit static copies of them.
• Use scraped product photographs.
• Publish a guide whose only work was reordering an Amazon results page.

How products are linked

Where the honest recommendation is a specific product, the link points at that product's page. Where the honest recommendation is a category — common for commodity items, where the specification you check matters more than the brand — the link points at a filtered category search and the guide tells you which specification to check before buying. Both carry the affiliate tag and both are disclosed.

Affiliate links

Amazon links use this site's Amazon Associates tag and carry rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", which is what Google asks for. A disclosure appears above the first affiliate link on any page that has one, not only in the footer. Nothing is routed through a shortener or a cloaking redirect. Full terms: affiliate disclosure.