Consumer Reports lets you see one class of product before making you subscribe. They are still the most independent.

Before I buy anything, I go to amazon to check customer ratings. I have not yet been disappointed.

I think the a fabulous and unbiased site for this stuff is http://consumersearch.com

They might not have all your household goods, but they do a great job of aggregating other reviews and distilling the research down into a few choices. They even look at consumer reports and amazon. It can get out of date, but it’s really worth checking out.

@ben Thanks for that one!

After having used consumersearch for a very long time, I finally switched to paying for Consumer Reports. And, despite meaning to cancel after the first month, I’m still a subscriber, since I still keep using it.

The one problem with consumersearch is that they’re often not the most up-to-date, and many times aggregating information from a bunch of different sources only tells you “there a few good models, but people don’t agree on which ones are good”.