Asking for professional opinions seems worse than random selection, since orthos for example will just recommend the surgeon they have the best business relationship with. Online research will find the worst surgeons with the most tech savvy since most surgeons have terrible online presence to begin with, and the ones that advertise tend to be the ones that need to. Lastly, reviews and forums are a little help, but they are skewed by echo chamber effect and being a very very small and biased subset of people who get surgery.
So, is there actually any intelligent way to select a surgeon? Is it all just down to luck and location?
I would say it's about first of all determining what you are looking to achieve. Different surgeons are better at different things.
Look at their papers, what is published, the quality of said papers, quality of photos.
See what their reputation is amongst other surgeons. So when you consult surgeon X, ask what he thinks about surgeon Y. Most will give a pretty honest opinion.
Find other online testimonials and results if possible.
At the end of the day you're always taking a chance and even the best surgeon doesn't have a 100% satisfaction rate. So with that in mind also find out about their attitude towards revisions. Some will do it for free, for cheaper, and others will become complete assholes.
Edit: I will also say that in a lot of ways things are made complicated by the fact that so few results of any surgeon are online. I guess because maxfac isn't too common a procedure and most are, as the person above says, referred to them by their ortho. They have the work done and never think about it again. On some level I think most surgeons will do a fine just as long as they demonstrate a willingness to achieve a good aesthetic result and aren't just solely focused on functionality.