Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

There is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of 'best bikes under $500' for any reason other than this though?

However. the fact that you found so many amazon affiliates says more about the integrity of other bike retailers. Why would there not be an even spread of affiliate links to merchants other than amazon do you wonder?

Certainty of payment, that's why.

I don't think there is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of best bikes for under $500. There are plenty of incentives for journalism publications like MCN (motorcycle news) to do reviews of the products in the sectors they cover. There are plenty of publications about Cycling, it's a very popular sport.

The problem is that the monetization of the affiliate system creates a massive incentive for people to crowd out the real people who do this. Instead of googling which bike to buy and being met with a number of fairly reputable publications which specialize in this stuff, you're met with Business Insider and other trash which are all just following the incentive of trying to get their affiliate link clicked between the time you start researching and the time you innevitably buy something off Amazon.

I think the MCN example above is actually really good - since no one expects to get an affiliate payment from Amazon from someone buying a motorcycle, the quality of the reviews for "Best motorbike under $5000" are about a million times better than "Best bike for under $500". The good reviews do exist, you just can't find them, because Amazon has completely screwed the click through path from "Google X product -> Purchase on Amazon"

If people are not willing to pay for content and block ads, affiliate and content marketing schemes might be the future of these sites as well.

I think search is broken full stop for any search in the form "Best X in/for/under Y" - there are too many low quality sites publishing 'list' articles, which just link to items for sale that offer them affiliate commission.

For the example of "bikes under $500" it's often better to do a google news search to get magazine/newspaper articles where they are more likely to have done actual reviews.

> There is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of 'best bikes under $500' for any reason other than this though?

“Back in the olden days” people would write pages because they loved the subject area and wanted to share knowledge/show off/start conversations.

So it was very common for people who were just really into bikes to spend some time sharing their thoughts on what the top 10 bikes under $500 were because they wanted to help people buy good bikes. There was no monetization, or at least direct monetization.

Those sites may still be around, but monetization has driven low-quality content higher up in SEO so the bike lover (who probably doesn’t care about SEO) doesn’t get content seen.