Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin):
PC Gamer
The Verge
Games Radar
Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech)
A giant ad showing some laptops to buy
Youtube (channel: PC Builder)
RTINGS.com
PC Magazine
Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now)
CNET
Tom's Hardware
Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy
Engadget
PC Magazine
Laptop Mag
TechRadar
These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the reason that it's a bunch of similar listicles is because the thing you're looking for (a laptop) is a product with relatively few entries in the market.
What are you expecting here that Google isn't giving you? I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, but, for me, the expected results are about as good as I could hope for.
That's kind of the point. Old Google unearthed things. New Google is where you go to find out what the media (and Google) wants you to know.
If that's what you want, then sure, Google is great.
I used "best gaming laptop" as an example, but you can try "what is the best mayonnaise" if you'd like. My results included Uproxx. Which I guess counts as "unearthing," since I would never go to a clickbait farm like Uproxx for culinary tips.
I'm not suggesting I have an alternative, before you ask. This may be nothing more than the inevitable result of the commercialization and commodification of the Internet. Since all of the search companies are going all-in on AI stuff, you may find yourself in my position in a year or two.
But if these are the complaints about Google - "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute the mainstream" - I'm... ok with that? That seems like a good outcome to me. I don't mind using that tool.
From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside Google - more like a change in society.
It is possible that this is a problem that will solve itself. I think a lot (most?) mainstream media outlets are hemorrhaging money, and the gravy train can't go on forever. We'll reach some maximum of Terrible Crap, and it will peter out, and then maybe Google can get back to finding honest content and playing merry hell with Internet standards.
The problem as I see it is that the mainstream websites are not good. Search results that gave a broader range of hits than just that sort of thing would be much, much more useful.
If I want, for example, to find what laptops people consider the best, none of those sites help me.
There are sites that do some good gear reviews for relatively specialized equipment--especially not gadget/electronics. But this isn't the 1990s when PC Magazine would have a 600-page issue with a big chunk devoted to the best printers as evaluated by their on-payroll staff.
I'll occasionally put a review of something up on my site but I have neither the money or interest in doing multi-product comparisons. That's pretty much impractical outside of something like Wirecutter (which I generally think does a pretty good job).
If you can't extrapolate the larger point from that, I don't know what to tell you.
But you are suggesting with "if people link to Tom's hardware" that PageRank is still in play. As far as I know, it isn't anymore. There may be something similar or related to PageRank in the black box Google unhelpfully calls "the algorithm," but it's not counting up the number of links and showing that. Google dropped and/or altered that fairly quickly after people learned to game it.
Perhaps you have never had to alter, tweak, or otherwise fold, spindle and mutilate your search queries in order to get Google to find what you're looking for instead of what seems to be clickfarming nonsense. If so, I'm impressed. I would also say that you are pretty unique, as bashing Google to get it to spit out something useful seems to be more and more difficult these days.
I believe Google is aware of this problem. It's why they're jumping into AI like everybody else. They have reached the end of what they can contort the algorithm into doing, so they are going to replace at least some of their search with AI generated answers.
I have no idea why people are so eager to defend Google either. They are a privacy nightmare, they run roughshod over Internet standards, and they throw their considerable weight around like a bully. It's very weird.
Lots of comments in there about how SO doesn't show up as more (or at all) in Google results, and instead we get geek4geek or whatever other clickfarm sites there are out there for technical questions. It's a great example of exactly the problem I was talking about. Is it still comical to you?
Sure, yeah, anecdata and all that, but until I'm hired to dig through all of the internals of Google, anecdotes are about all we've got. Other than Google's reassurances that Everything Is Going Just Splendidly.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second
If you're really going to page 7 of Google... man, that's a desperation I've never known.
It is a violent and windswept place, barren of joy or peace.
Maybe you'll find a blog post from someone who bought a gaming laptop and found it pretty good? Or an old forum thread like this one[1]
Not a lot of actual human beings sitting around buying and comparing various gaming laptops. It's much more likely the content you'll find is from some content mill.
https://www.aisearch.vip?q=what%27s%20the%20best%20gaming%20...
Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.