Product review search engine Retrevo was selected to launch at DEMO yesterday and it’s pretty cool. We’ve written about competitor ViewScore here before and also launched this month is yet another similar service that just launched called Wize. All of these sites will help you find reviews of electronics and other products and each of them has a unique feature set that adds value to the basic search and aggregation.
What could be better than services that aggregate reviews? Perhaps an aggregate review of these type of services. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’ve come to the right place. If neither gadgets nor reviews are your thing, I think the following are still interesting case studies in how to add value on top of product search and affiliate revenue generation.
Affiliate and contextual advertising have created a seductive opportunity for monetization that many site designers are seeking to cash in on. There are so many sites that try to monetize affiliate links that I’ve grown bored with most of them, but the following ones are more fresh and interesting than most. Between these three sites I think that Wize has the best chance for commercial success, but I really like some of the features of the other two sites, Retrevo and Viewscore.
Retrevo
Retrevo just launched yesterday. It discovers product manuals and previews them if in PDF format, displays information from manufacturer websites, searches blogs and forums, professional reviews and articles and offers a preview pane to easily switch between sources.
It does not offer numerical ratings, saved searches or much else. The variety of sources searched are very good, but not much value added on top of that. For a simple, powerful, thorough search – Retrevo is a good option. The company is backed by just under one million dollars from Alloy Ventures and is seeking further funding. They plan to roll out many new features in the future to support the full life-cycle of product ownership all the way to recycling things. Matt Marshall wrote about Retrevo earlier this week.
ViewScore
Israel based ViewScore uses numeric score averaging and a semantic algorithm to give products an average score out of 100 over thousands of professional reviews online. The review sources are ranked by another algorithm and user feedback. The site grabs product specs, compares similar products and offers comparative pricing from multiple online shopping sites. Users can also sign up to get an alert when a new review for a particular product is available.
Viewscore currently offers 60,000 reviews from 1,000 sources. Blogs and other social media are not included. The company says it hopes to expand it’s basic formula beyond gadgets and into many other fields. See our initial review of Viewscore here.
Wize
Wize aggregates reviews on far more than just electronics, it’s got home and garden, video games, health products and more. It searches shopping sites with user reviews like Shopping.com and Amazon and expert reviews from traditional product review sites. The company says it has 757,136 product reviews from 4,735 different websites for 19,806 different products. That’s a lot of websites, 4,735.
Wize quantifies what percentage of reviews were positive or negative (”users like it”) and it tracks buzz – by simply counting what percentage of reviews for a product were posted in the last 60 days and how the reviews rated that product relative to others in its class. The site combines user ratings with expert review ratings and the buzz formula above to give products an overall Wize rating. User research can be saved via a cookie, without creating an account.
The site is very aesthetically pleasing and probably has the best chance of commercial success. I think people like the combination of trusted professional sources along with simple up or down community voting. It’s not the most subtle, interesting approach here but I think it’s likely to work the best with large numbers of users.
Others
Also worth looking at again if review aggregation is what you’re in the mood for are ShopWiki (our review – it’s got loads of cool features) and Külist, which is strange but kind of cool. Metacritic is probably the overall review ag leader, but doesn’t do gadgets.
These are the types of sites that only so many people probably want to think about them too often – but when you need one they are quite handy. More are sure to pop up any day now, but I think the sites above provide a good look at the state of the art.
Just visited Wise.com. I tried looking for a miniDV camcorder, and was disappointed by the results. There is really no way of sorting the results, and the filter is very weak. For example, I could only sort by manufacturer, by digital vs. analog, and by price. Multiple selections are not possible, either, so there’s no way, for instance, to show only camcorders of Sony + JVC – it’s either-or. Not impressed at all.. sorry!
Wize has many categories but the scoring algorithm is not working!!!!
Just search for “Nikon d70″ and you will see the same product twice with totally different score
How can the same product have different score in the same website? (The difference is 83 and 60)
PS –I hope they will change it after my post this is why I am adding a screen shot.
http://tinyurl.com/ocd6o
JhonP- one is the d70 body only camera and one is with a lens…
but all the reviews are for the nikon d70 camera…
if you will go to dpreview.com and look for nikon d70 digital camera you will see it is not giving diffrent score to product kits.
nikon d70 is nikond70 is nikon d70 ……
(i have the EOS 20D so i know what i am talking about)
Lee from Wize.com here —
JhonP, I totally see your point, but as “me” (not I) points out, while the base product model is the same, one camera is packaged with a zoom lens — it’s packaged and priced differently. You raise a great point about the Wize Rank, which is based on an algorithm that reflects consensus opinion across the web. Why does the inclusion of a zoom lens solicit different feedback from customers on what is essentially the same device? Maybe customers don’t like the zoom lens, and it affects their perception of the product or its value. Maybe people who are willing to spend nearly $900 on a camera have different (higher?) expectations. You can use the site to dig into the detail so you’re not making purchase decisions based on rank alone.
Pluto, I want to point out that the site allows you to filter on multiple attributes/selections, just not multiple vendors.
Retrevo not only helps users with pre-purchase research but also supports you with relevant answers *after* you have purchased a product [No one else cares about you for the next five years?] You point out a couple of things we don’t do and these *features* will naturally get added over time. Not a big deal. You should review Retrevo with that perspective, see if you can get better answers elsewhere for installing, using and fixing your products. Retrevo has bigger ambitions and will become a trusted brand for consumers to manage their lifecycle ownership of these products.
Marshall, are they based out of Valley?
Lee, telling me it is a feature and not a bug insult our intelligence….
wize can not rank product only by positive\negative score and this
bug prove it…..
It’s better than wading thru Froogle. 756,xxx.. When will Wize.com hit a million reviews?
Rafe Needleman from CNET review of ViewScore.com
http://reviews...._7-6639188.html
Farg, we expect to have more than a million reviews on Wize.com well before Thanksgiving.
A friend of mine works for alaTEST.com. Just like the sites listed above they aggregate reviews. The difference is perhaps that alaTEST has launched in 10 countries and shows more detailed information about the reviews. As they work with a number of different shopping agents as partners, showing their lowest prices, they are also effectively a price comparison service on price comparison services.
On their site, they mention they list over 400 000 reviews from over 500 different sources. Which of these sites is best?
There is also FindProductReview.com, they are probably the biggest product review search engine for expert reviews. The do not publish consumer reviews though.
I have spent the last week checking out the above sites. Wize looks nicest, but as mentioned above their score is not at all reliable. It is mainly based on very few consumer opinions. They seem to be backed with a lot of capital, as shown in the design. John above is likely from FPR, at least he should say so as does Anna (”a friend”, right). Their site looks home made and no overall rating is presented. Alatest is also from Sweden like FPR (why, are those the same guys perhaps?), and seem like FPR bigger international brother. More reviews, both pro and consumer, as well as a unique meta-price-comparison service, comparing the lowest prices from a number of price comparison services. The also have an interesting new feature that automatically translates foreign reviews to english. I guess time for a real review of all review aggregators. Soon on Cnet?
eCoustics.com has aggregated electronics reviews for years.
http://www.ecoustics.com
At iNods http://www.inods.com, we have launched a number of features recently which will make it very easy for shoppers to find specific user reviews and then decide what to buy. Check out the iNods guides as well!
Well, while we’re listing the multitudes, you can add http://eDistiller.com to the list.
Good article and good lists. Not sure if http://www.seedic.com would be one of aggregate websites. thx.
Good article and good lists. Not sure if