How we research

A great deal of what is written about “the best” of anything in Singapore is a business describing itself, or someone describing a business they have never measured. LocalRank starts from the opposite end. Wherever a public authority already publishes a tested, comparable figure — a fee, an efficiency rating, a licence, a demerit record — that figure is the spine of the page, and the business’s own marketing is treated as a claim to be attributed rather than a fact to be repeated.

This is not always possible, and where it is not, we say so plainly rather than filling the gap with an opinion dressed as a measurement. A page that admits what it cannot know is more useful than one that pretends to know it.

These are the authoritative Singapore sources behind our comparisons. Each one is downloaded, kept as a dated snapshot, and re-read on every refresh — because most of these registers have no “withdrawn” field, so the only way to notice that something has left is to compare today’s copy against the last.

• ECDA — the Listing of Centres and the Listing of Centre Services, which together publish a fee for every licensed preschool and infant-care centre, by citizenship, programme and level. It is the reason a preschool comparison can be built on prices at all.
• MSF — the register of student-care centres registered for fee assistance, which is authoritative for the centres in it and, in the ministry’s own words, does not cover those that never registered. We say which is which.
• MOE — the register of registered private schools, and MOE Kindergarten data. Registration proves a school exists and meets a floor; MOE states plainly that it is not an endorsement of quality, and neither do we treat it as one.
• NEA — the Mandatory Energy Labelling register of goods, which gives every air conditioner, refrigerator and other regulated appliance sold here a tested efficiency figure measured to one standard. It is the rare case where the headline number genuinely compares across brands.
• Trade and licensing registers — the NEA vector-control operator register and BCA contractor registers, which establish that a business holds the licence its trade requires.

Each register establishes something specific and narrow. Being on it usually proves an entity exists and is permitted to trade; it rarely proves the entity is good. We are careful about that difference on every page.

For product comparisons — broadband and mobile plans, appliances — the unit is the exact model or plan, and the rule that governs the whole page is that a specification without its test conditions is not a specification. A dehumidifier’s extraction figure means nothing without the temperature and humidity it was measured at; two air purifiers’ clean-air numbers do not compare unless they name the same pollutant and standard. Where manufacturers publish to different conditions, we do not convert between them and pretend they line up. We segment the table, print the condition beside every figure, and leave a cell blank with a reason rather than fill it with a guess.

Some categories have no authoritative register and no comparable measurement — only what businesses say about themselves. We do not refuse to cover them, but we do not manufacture a ranking out of taste and present it as evidence either. On those pages the comparison is built from what each business actually publishes, attributed to it, and the page says openly that it is describing claims rather than measuring outcomes.

Third-party review scores, star ratings and “best of” lists from elsewhere contribute nothing to our research. They are opinions about opinions, and repeating them would only launder them.

LocalRank offers marketing and search services to businesses, and it publishes comparisons and rankings. Those two things do not touch. A business cannot buy a position, a score, or a place on a list, and no commercial relationship changes where an entity falls in a comparison. Ranking order comes from the evidence and the published methodology, full stop.

Advertising, when it appears, is labelled as advertising and kept visibly separate from editorial. This is set out in full in our editorial policy, ranking methodology and advertising policy, and it is the single commitment the rest of the publication depends on.

Registers change, prices move, and businesses close. We keep a dated snapshot of every source and re-derive each page from it rather than editing figures by hand, so a refresh is a matter of re-reading the source and letting every dependent page update at once. Each figure on a page carries the date it was last verified. If you find one that has gone stale, please tell us — a correction is a contribution, not a complaint.