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.