While there's certainly a lot of crap out there, the example used is weird. Yep, if you search for reviews for a product for which no credible reviews exist yet (due to it being unreleased), you're going to find garbage.
Search for reviews for a product which actually exists, and you might get some better results. Drop the "U" from "Nintendo Wii Review" and you'll find reviews as sensible as you could hope for.
Try finding a review for any printer. or a car. or most cell phones. It's all link bait tar-pit SEO sites. This is what the article is talking about and he's absolutely right.
However, this does bring in an opportunity for someone to displace google. Not with better search but with better find-what-I'm-looking-for engines.
have you tried that? I don't know if it's changed recently or not, but I just tried some searches for reviews of a printer, a car, and a cellphone and got all seemingly reputable links on the first page.
(these seemed like fairly typical products you might search for in these categories...I don't actually know any of them very well)
Now, that's not to say that cnet is the best place to get reviews, but it definitely isn't anywhere near as bad as the sites I seem to remember review queries formerly returning.
What we really need is a good way of searching for those really good review sites that people who know about them absolutely trust. I can't think of any way to structure a query that might get me from looking for a camera to danso's endorsement of DPReview above. Narrowing to forums might help get you there, but it would be nice to not have to open a bunch of discussion pages and scan for decent seeming sites.
Yes...perhaps one that is able to efficiently collect a database of product stats (including release date) and use that as a signal to gauge whether a "review" is actually a review.
But this seems like an almost-already-solved machine learning problem, right? Google's spider will net not just fake reviews, but previews of a given item...if it finds that reliable (high PageRank) sites have "previews" of said item, and a bunch of random sites have "reviews"...all within the same date, then it could make a judgment, right?
Pretty similar problem with online travel information, fwiw. Tons of low-information sites that exist solely to affiliate-link you to Orbitz or hotels.com, which often still rank highly.
Search for reviews for a product which actually exists, and you might get some better results. Drop the "U" from "Nintendo Wii Review" and you'll find reviews as sensible as you could hope for.