About

About us

OnlySelect.com is committed to bringing innovative products and services to all who have spent far too long wasting time and getting second best. We have all at some stage been disappointed by 'the advertising hype' being much better than the delivered result. And when you spend your own time researching tech items, why is it often so difficult to sort 'the wheat from the chaff' and find products up to the task?

Our Mission

There is clearly a pattern of it being harder and harder to easily find the most useful products and services. Yes they still normally exist, but good products and features that once prevailed and stood out can get demoted, buried, diluted, or even cancelled. Quantities can get smaller and/or these things can all get repositioned and controlled behind an ever increasing 'paywall' or 'search barrier'.

Yesterday's 'standard feature' may suddenly become today's 'special premium option', even if almost identical. Unfortunately a similar thing is happening with other 'quite important' things like housing, health, food, safety from crime, clean water, free speech . . . (possibly for exactly the same or similar reasons? - but let's not delve too deeply into that here today. 🙂 )

Our Mission Here

Our mission here is to make sure good products and services are carefully selected and tested over time, and then not cancelled, bombarded with any 'hazy cloud of regurgitated false likes', dislikes, big promotions, or hidden by whoever and by whatever means. This will enable you to more easily find and select decent quality, more effective innovative items that make sense without the confusion and time wastage.

We will also like to work with select partners to expand the selection offered, but never at the expense of quantity over quality.

Our Mission

The OnlySelect.com domain name was first registered in 2011 and purchased by us in 2017.
This particular website, OnlySelect.com, halfway through 2024 is totally new, but launched under the established SelectWebGroup.com 'Sites You Can Trust' banner. OnlySelect (as indicated by the name) supplies carefully selected select products and services to you via our online shop.

Our Mission

You should really never have to intensively search and go through multiple complex products and variations from numerous suppliers and then conflicting spurious reviews, which even then may mean the item does not work well, or is nowhere in the country.

It is our experience when evaluating products, that 'trusted reviews' and rankings can be misleading and 'amazingly' contrary to the true merits of individual products. For example: we receive regular communications offering to increase rankings, add 'likes' or 'genuine' positive reviews for a fee (which we just ignore or say no to). You may also commonly find articles/reviews for the 'top-20' best of the type of product you seek, but which do not even include the product or service which would be most-suitable both for you and many other people. It is also a fact that many busy people commonly do not leave any review at all when a product works smoothly for them. So to see so many 100%, 5-star reviews really should start to 'set off the alarm bells'.

It is a pity that many ranking and listing facilities do not properly test products and/or have cooperated with censorship/cancellation regimes or other listing measures that can distort and be really unhelpful to decent web users. The risk of you being guided to choose a 'less than ideal' product is amplified when these kinds of methods are employed and when promotion and marketing is put ahead of the design and quality of a product or service.
Or to put it another way: Just because an item is promoted to the first result page of a search engine or review service does not mean it is a good product or best for you. It may simply mean that much promotional budget and time (that could have been focused on improving the product) has been spent on arranging that position, or even on directly paying some kind of fee to be listed there.

If you take a closer look at the top positions in search engine rankings, it is not very hard to see that many top positions are commonly taken by entities who directly pay the search engine and/or are sometimes partly funded by 'generously passing' your valuable personal browsing data 'to whoever', maybe without your consent (or via 'the more nebulous legitimate interest reason' that you never actually explicitly opted in to). So perhaps it is no wonder that you can get a browsing/searching experience where you do not easily find what you are looking for, get something which is distantly related to your search, or get fed a result which is completely 'sub-optimal'.

Our Mission

Like with so many things, when you are able to recognise and define a problem, then the 'simple solution' can sometimes 'jump out at you'. We simply experience, test and list select interesting useful products and present them honestly to you without them being buried amongst 'a sea of inferior ones' that can be propped up and promoted by numerous questionable reviews and opaque ranking methods.

Clearly when ranking methods are spurious, opaque or 'ever changing', or if controlled by very few monopoly-type entities, any genuine effort today to honestly and consistently communicate products and services can quickly be undone and wasted, and therefore become a cost to all of us. i.e. There is a whole industry behind ranking and any investment in that area can quickly be 'shot down in flames', costing web users more. For example: many businesses do their best to jump through 'the hoops insisted on' and then both them and their customers can get 'burned' because of the 'next great, big, bright idea'. It could involve more control of independent websites or otherwise AI algorithms where 'nobody is responsible'. Artificial intelligence, in our view is neither artificial nor intelligent! No, like all coding it is steered and honed by somebody or an organisation and that is the main thing to recognise.

We need to have the intelligence to see AI commonly comes out with mindless or very intended consequences, as does any entity that has too much power controlling anything including important parts of the internet . See one reported example of many at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-how-googles-new-algorithm-will-shape-your-internet

Our Mission

Do we (and will we ever) list and help to sell everything or anything 'under the sun'?

Definitely not. And we are no eBay or Amazon, although product and service owners can request to have items listed on our site, which may then be listed if we consider the products/services are interesting and genuinely good and advantageous to users.

The first thing you may notice about our site (especially soon after launch) is it really has very few products and services presently listed. It reminds us slightly of GBNews when various advertising entities and established interests 'were' boycotting it! (maybe because of its lack of bias and censorship?)

The GBNews, free 'People's Channel' stands up for freedom, open expression, and clearly does not support censorship and cancellation culture. Yes we are a fan of the channel (and obviously free speech) and there is even a website called boycottgbnews.org, started in part by a former senior BBC producer, clearly aiming to cancel, censor and/or 'sink' the popular British People's Channel! (We would recommend a brief look at the 'wokie', cancellation/boycott site, if only to see the type of organisations that are reported there to have pulled out of advertising on the new, innovative news channel.)

Censorship, manipulation or cancellation of views, attempting to cause financial damage, and preventing free expression of a wide range of views are not British values and are certainly not what my late Grandad and many others served for in the last World War.

But the real reason here (after being 'inadvertently and so rudely diverted!') for there being few products on this site is mainly because we are not only new but very selective about the products and services that appear here. All items are selected carefully and then we commonly experience and 'drill down' into the individual products themselves over time before rejecting or recommending them to you, all based on specialist knowledge and experience.

Is there a tech bias to the items we list and offer for sale?

Yes definitely. Information technology is our primary skillset. But it is no 'golden rule set in stone' and other interesting items are sometimes listed, and those encompassing those with a benefit to society or world freedom.

Do we sometimes receive commission for items we list and recommend?

Yes, if the product is 'third party' (i.e. not our own) then to help fund our service we sometimes receive some commission, margin (or affiliate payment from some partners). But in terms of priority and order: we commonly use and evaluate the products first, and then reject the majority of them (however big the pressure, supplier, or promoter). If it will not work well for you then it does not fit with us. And second-rate products would just undermine the whole purpose of our site.