If you are confused whether to buy a Nokia phone or a Sony phone? iPod or Zune?; and don’t want to go through tons of sites/reviews, ReviewGist might just work for you.
ReviewGist is a Gurgaon based startup that attempts to collate/aggregate product reviews across the Internet. In their own words:
We give you the ReviewGist – the big picture with the small details: everything that’s good and everything that’s bad, we tell you which notebook has the stunning looks and the one which is a battery hog. We give you crisp aggregated information from different reviews – digested by our computers and served for you to sample.
ReviewGist collates reviews from several trusted sources (pcmag/zdnet/pcworld/cnet/dpreview etc) and uses deep semantic analysis engine to extract the subjective opinion from these aggregated reviews. The extracted opinions are then combined together to present you the unified gist. Furthermore, these opinions are also rated to give you aggregate rankings.
What’s really commendable about ReviewGist is it’s semantic approach towards product reviews – there are just too many reviews about a product and instead of going thru’ the details of each and every review, I’d rather look at the summary of the reviews.
ReviewGist also fetches the price from relevant sources (like Amazon/shop.com etc) and one can also compare products by reviews or by specs (which I think is damn cool).
What I really like about ReviewGist is it’s sentiment-o-meter feature (e.g. 58% positive reviews) , which shows an overall gist of reviews from the wild web. Apart from saving user’s time (in going thru’ tons of bad products), ReviewGist also enables one to drill down and do a feature-by-feature rating/review.
Overall, ReviewGist is a great start, but I guess UI is just too overwhelming for a normal user (techies should be fine with all the AJAXified effect). Moreover, they need to add one search filter, a very basic functionality, i.e. ability to search by product/brand/price range etc and the serp should display relevant results (otherwise the end user still has to go thru’ tons of reviews/filters to land up with a suitable deal).
They need to add more interactivity to the site by enabling comparisons of competitive products or a recommender engine; and show the gist of how does a product fare w.r.t a recommended product/competition (isn’t that a review/comparison site is all about, i.e. comparison of competing products?)
As of now, ReviewGist is targeting US shopping sites (which makes perfect sense) and has data (like cost/warranty info/availability etc) relevant to US only.
What’s your feedback on ReviewGist? Will you use the site for decision making?
Related product: QuarkRank
tags: reviewgist, quarkrank
I am sure ReviewGist guys will target other markets as well very soon. Currently Indian market really lacks an ideal shopping/review/comparison site which can tell prices as well, and yeah I have seen Compare India.
– @Ashish regarding UI being too overwhelming for a normal user
I find UI very simple to use and navigate. As you said they are currently targeting only US markets, and a US user is quiet a techie compare to an Indian sub-continent user.
They should also add reviews from bloggers and let users add their review as well. Most of these shopping comparison sites rely a lot on Search Engine Traffic which means you need a good link popularity to sustain.
But overall its a great site, which some really good features. A job very well done.
@ Ankit:
I agree with you . I too find their UI very intuitive . i can relate to their product’s value proposition after having recently gone through the pain of deciding which Camera to buy . infact when Nishant [ Co Founder of Review Gist] demonstrated their product at Barcamp Delhi 3 i thought “Damn ,this is late by two weeks ”
regarding UGC based review, i think for High value purchase like Gadgets
everyone wants to read expert opinion first . this is not to say that UGC has no value , it has but i think good point is to provide UGC Review aggregation but making clear distinction between two while representing result would be a good idea . it will make decision making easier .
@Ankit/Prashant
From my experience (of focus groups conducted), a typical non-techie user in US is equally dumb than anywhere else (otherwise who do you think gets confused with google adsense as site links, and clicks on it?)
- essentially, my confusion with ReviewGist is that they are positioning themselves as a review aggregation site and not a place to “search for items that I am planning to buy” – there is a huge diff. between the two and from the landing page, it looks as if ReviewGist is pushing you to search for few specific queries.
They should take a leaf out of “I am feeling lucky” button
Thanks much Ashish for this exhaustive post.
I must say that you are spot-on on the value proposition of ReviewGist, and for once I have nothing more to add on that front.
Some quick comments on the very relevant points you raised:
1. I completely agree that UI/usability is not there yet for a typical internet user. In fact there are a lot of features that we haven’t pushed out yet (and that we understand our technology can enable) just because we don’t completely understand how to present them for a typical internet consumer.
I think we have improved considerably over the last few months, however usability is still one of the biggest challenges we face as we try to get our technology and concept gain acceptance with the user.
2. Though currently our search interface does not encapsulate brand and price, the same currently exist on the left hand side filters section on the search page. Also, on the search box we do enable brand specific searches (eg: ‘canon cameras’).
3. Enabling comparisons of competitive products is a very good suggestion. We will take that up ASAP. For now we do have few existing comparisons that you can access from the home page (Popular Comparisons block on the left bottom). Additionally you can select specific products on the search page by selecting the “Compare Reviews” checkbox and compare the same.
For a quick view of our comparison interface you can check out this link: http://www.reviewgist.com/tags/mp3-player/popular_mp3_players
Thanks again for your encouraging post. I will be keeping pace with the comments here and respond accordingly.
regards,
Nishant
CEO, ReviewGist.com
@Asish
- My thoughts are aligned to yours on the fact that we still need to simplify things more to get across even to a typical US interent user.
- On the positioning, it is true that at this point of time the messaging is more aligned towards a “review aggregation site”. However, our targeted positioning is for a “product discovery and research site” and we are in the process of changing our messaging to account for the same.
Hey there is a small bug
“Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /home/pluggd/public_html/wp-includes/rss.php on line 431″
in the column on the right
Hey Asankhya,
I am aware of that bug..its actually stupid that wp’s rss widget has some issues…will fix it or remove it!!
have you seen summize.com ? ‘love that site for reviews
@Prashant
Expert reviews!!!
) on Amazon. The first thing most people, I am sure including you as well will do is scroll down to read reviews given by the people who have seen that movie, rather than reading Editorial reviews.
Frankly speaking not many people care about them.
Just for a second, try to remember the last time you were searching for a movie (you were about to download via torrent
And if you really care about Expert reviews, then try reading new Bollywood movie reviews by Rediff Experts. And don`t blame me if you fall down your chair laughing.
I believe bring expert reviews only if you don`t have many UGC reviews for a particular product, and not vice versa.
Summize.com has a decent UI, I agree.
But the Reviewgist text mining rocks. They are actually able to pick out good/bad qualities *feature wise*! Which is really helpful when I’m looking for a phone with decent battery life, but don’t care about the multi-touch screen.
@Ankit
For movies I definitely agree with you that user reviews make much more sense.
Electronics however we understand to be slightly different. User reviews, specifically for electronics, are extremely biased towards being highly positive. This is because a lot of times a critical analysis requires one to look at competing products in detail which is something only experts do.
An automated system cannot hope to be accurate incase it is based on something which in itself is not an accurate representation of the real world facts. (for the techie audience does this rhyme with ‘OOPs” or is it just me ?)
Secondly, a lot of times, and often surprisingly the ratings that users give is different from the sentiment reflected in the review. So occasionally people will talk extremely negative about some specific feature but when they give the ratings they will be generous and round it off to something like a 3 out of 5. (This is essentially why our ratings reflect the actual underlying sentiments rather than any score)
For these specific reasons a bulk of the user reviews are not as useful for a critical analysis – the ones which are useful are qualitatively similar to expert reviews.
@Ankit : i think it just opposite case . we can argue about it till cow come home . i suggest you read this http://tinyurl.com/225leh . majority of commentators in this post are of opinion that UGC is good but Professional stuff is far from dead .Now talking about User generated reviews . my take is that whats true for Books/Movie is not true for Gadgets
Value of a book depends on my taste too its subjective . even when you and I buy same book its Value for us might be diffrent depending upon our personality and what u look for in that book . i read Crichton for the sole purpose of finding scientific research he blends in narration . some other chap might read it for thrill of Plot and excitment . so when it comes to book/music/movies we teds to be subjective and want to stick to a reviewr we know and trus . i will buy a book if Rashmi of JAMMAG gives it a thumbs up .
but its not like that with gadgert or high value items.
Photography and MP3 players are very very objective things . you can easily parametrize them [ Focus,IR support , Wide Angle, Zoom Capability , annual setting allowed, support for sepia ] you can literally break it down to a lot l of parameter . and i don’t think every one can understand that so we tends to go to Professional reviewer . common argument against them is that these reviewers are up for sale , but this is not the case look at Walt Mosberg of WSJ, Folks at Gizmodo, Engadget so there is surely some value in expertise .
still if won’t be a bad move to integrate sites like Amazon or Mouthshut to the list .
@Prashant
I have rarely seen Engadget and Gizmodo giving expert(lengthy) reviews for anything other than iPhone or apple products.
The comments they receive from the community are more insightful then the bloggers on payroll by them.
Even for electronics/apparel etc on sites like Amazon have some really great comments. The power of these comments lies in the different angle from which they look at the product. Some review the camera based on Focus, some on IR support , others on Wide Angle, etc. (I would review on Zoom capability). But the point is so many different voices, passionate voices with very short commentary and further rated among them can be entertaining and insightful as well.
And the question on expertise, just writing for a famed blog or a site with sound grammar does n`t make them expert. Here is a comparison by not an expert on iphone and Nokia e70. (Maddox) and other by Engadget.
@Nishant
Automate systems need to very accurate, and that’s one area where I applaud you. You guys have done a great job in bringing accurate automated reviews for most of the products.
But don`t miss the reviews done by bloggers who are NOT considered expert, and neither the reviews of the community/your-users who visits your site. Don`t let those interesting voices go unheard.
Bringing all these three under one page and marking them clearly, will be an additional bonus.
@Ashish
Just a passing thought. How about an idea to aggregate comments based on the rankings given to them by that blog’s user itself or by new users. For eg. Digg comments, behind trolls, many are really entertaining. I have seen co-comments doing something with comments, but this would be entirely a different ball game. What do you think?
Incidentally, my wife was considering buying a Nokia 5310 and I said why not check out the reviews on ReviewGist. Unfortunately, the only thing listed under “5310″ was a Gateway Computer. As a first time user to this site, my experience tells me that its not a comprehensive site of product reviews.
What would really be nice is if I was prompted to enter my email on the “no-matching-results page” so they can notify me when suitable reviews become available. @Nishant – not sure what would it take to build real-time aggregation but if you already have the scraping engine built, just pick the first 10 sites from a google search (or troll selected sites such as cnet, pcmag, etc) and scrape them using your cool semantic engine, as a first step. Folks are already used to waiting inordinately long periods for results thanks to the travel sites. Atleast you have got the user glued to your site, while you build your knowledge base. With such a real-time mechanism in place, you should be able to serve reviews for users looking to buy “Gucci Shoes”. That’s stretching it but you get the gist.
@unmesh
Thanks much for giving reviewgist a shot. We are currently mostly targeting the US market and are only comprehensive as per what is available in the US.
For the Indian market this currently works only for camcorders and digital cameras because these categories are almost identical on what is sold in the US and India. For the rest we still support almost 70-80% of what is there in India.
We will be very soon ramping up on India specific models as our core technology scales up on that very easily.
I couldn’t stop myself comparing Reviewgist and Quarkshop (which I wrote about a few days ago).
Reviewgist’s product page is about funneling the visitor to sale, but Quarkshop is more about understanding product’s features. I am not saying that either of these are bad, but they have different goals at this time.
I find Reviewgist’s UI kiddish. I am unable to point what part of it makes me think it is for kids. Does anyone else get the same feeling about it?
Reviewgist probably has similar feature ratings as quarkshop, but visually it is much appealing on Quark.
I like how Reviewgist ranks products in a category ” Ranked 43 among 256 MP3 Players”. After seeing this I had an obvious question – who is first? They didn’t answer it by providing a link to a rank page for all MP3 Players. This is something I’d love to see.
If the service is targeted to US market, why are they getting reviews from CNET Australia instead of US?
They seem to have more categories than Quark, but it would be good to see how they handle other categories beyond consumer electronics.
http://www.reviewgist.com/mp3-player/review-Apple_iPod_Nano_Blue_%288_GB%2C_2000_Songs%29_Digital_Media_Player
http://www.quarkshop.com/mp3player/apple-ipod-nano-8gb
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