I did professional purchasing for 20 years. It was getting harder and harder to find products up to when I retired 5 years ago. The problem was not only searc

I did professional purchasing for 20 years. It was getting harder and harder to find products up to when I retired 5 years ago. The problem was not only search engines, but companies stopped listing specs for their products. The information about battery life, PC components, native screen resolution, power requirements, operating system requirements, what casings were made out of, warrantees, aspect ratios (think any modern monitor can handle 4:3 aspect ratio or 640x480? Think again) and more has been stripped from many product web sites. You don't know what you are going to get unless you buy one of them. Sometimes you buy one, order more and get something else. Business is putting itself out of business. One trick to finding products is to use image search. Depending on what you are looking for, if you can see an image of what is being sold it can give you a good idea of whether it is actually what you want. Setting a time frame for a search (e.g., last month, last year) can help limit it to products that actually exist. Get clever with keywords, use technical keywords that you think will only be included with products you want to buy (for example when searching for stage lighting, add "DMX".) Avoid noname nobrand products because they have nosupport. Use quotes around keywords. Some search engines (eBay) have a NOT function (use -keyword on eBay) which can help get rid of a lot of noise. Use one search engine (say eBay) to find what you want, then use keywords like brand name from that to do a search for somewhere that will sell you the product new with a warranty. Using "site:reddit.com" still works to find actual people offering opinions on a product; do something similar for products in particular classes (e.g., looking for music gear, use site:reverb.com). Talk to a reference librarian about how to narrow searches, many of them are experts at this.