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 → Read More
makes a lot of sense. . The site then crawls the web – namely a few major review sites – and grabs the pertinent scores and information. → Read More
John Biggs over at CrunchGear wrote about an Israeli startup called Viewscore that aggregates product reviews of gadgets from around the web. He says it’s like the metacritic.com of gadgets. The cool technology here though is that the site normalizes numeric ratings across sites that use different scales (a number out of ten or up to five stars are converted to a score out of 100) and uses semantic analysis to determine a number for reviews that don’t use numeric ratings. All the reviews are averaged and viewable individually. You can compare prices and rate the quality of the reviews. There’s also basic information displayed about each product and a product comparison page for many gadgets. Biggs, the CrunchGear editor, says the database of gadgets is pretty good so far. The company has told me that it intends to take its technology beyond gadgets but that this was the best place to start because there are already so many gadget reviews online. In related meta-review site news, the multi-topic review search engine iNods (see Mike’s review) released their 1.0 version today. There’s so much content available online these days that quality aggregation of it with some good added value on top is an important service to provide. I think there’s a lot of room for more entries into this space. → Read More
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