Retrevo, a site that aggregates information about consumer electronics from sources found across the web, has raised $8M in Series B funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Alloy Ventures. Both of these investors were also involved in the company’s Series A round. The company has raised $11.9M to date.

The purpose of Retrevo is to provide consumers with information about electronics before and after they purchase them. During the shopping phase, the site serves as an advisor and maps products visually according to how expensive and feature-intensive they are. Shoppers can also view expert and user reviews found from across the web, as well as prices from various online vendors. Much of this information is scraped from sites like Amazon and CNET (Retrevo started off as a vertical search engine, hence the sophisticated scraping technology).

Once consumers actually buy these electronics, Retrevo helps consumers learn about them and solve technical issues by aggregating user manuals and making them searchable.

The company says that it will use the new money to accelerate its pace of innovation, simplify the user experience, partner with complimentary services, and market the site. Retrevo also claims it has experienced double digit growth over recent months.

3i has invested €2.6 million in shopping search engine Twenga. Similar to other shopping search startups, Twenga is a meta search engine for products from online merchants. Twenga’s search results include user reviews and images on top of the usual price comparisons.

There are a ton of shopping product search engines out there right now. It’s a crowded space and to distinguish themselves companies have been focusing on advanced features such as deep product feature search (Retrevo) or price trend tracking (Mpire) to stand out. There’s The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight, Ugenie, and many more. Google had it’s own notable stumble in online product search as well.

Of the engines, Twenga is most like “The Find”. Search results are returned as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. This allows the engine to run more complex searches properties such as a 10% price drop. It also focuses on Europe and comes translated in an impressive six different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English). The network reached 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants

With so much choice, there’s no excuse to not get the lowest price on your Christmas gifts.

Retrevo, one of a number of automated, aggregate review sites we previously covered, is releasing an alpha version of a new product comparison feature called “Product Snapshot”. The feature helps find the greatest “bang for your buck” by visually displaying how a product’s price and features stack up against others in its category. CEO Vipin Jain will demo the feature at tomorrow’s Stanford Summit. The feature will go public at the end of September.

“Product Snapshot” maps a product’s place on a price/feature graph relative to other products in the category. The mapping of the product is based on a statistical analysis of a number of major features and prices drawn from across the web. Products with fewer features for their price fall at the bottom left of the chart, while products with high prices and many features are placed toward the upper right. For example, this search for a Samsung LN-S4696D shows where the LCD TV places relative to other mid-range TVs.

The snapshot also includes links to products with better features, similar products, and cheaper products. These features will be released at the end of September when the full feature is pushed live.

Retrevo distinguishes itself by focusing on consumer electronics and finding a great deal of auxiliary material on products. Searches return PDF product manuals, aggregate user ratings, product previews, written reviews, forums & blogs, and shopping links. The data is pulled from thousands of sites including those of manufacturers and retailers. Retrevo’s depth of information makes it best suited for initial product research instead of quick price comparisons.

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.