Searching for product reviews
Holiday shopping time is here but before you buy that gizmo you might want to see what others think about it. A post at Lockergnome points out a site called Summize that is a search engine just for product reviews.
Whether this narrowly focused search engine is more efficient at finding reviews than a general search engine I’m not sure. To a large extent, success with a search facility depends on your technique. As a quick and unscientific test, I tried looking for rock polishers (an item desired by a grandson). Entering “rock polisher” at Summize turned up only 8 reviews of 2 products. Searching “rock-polisher review” at Google gave 896 entries. Some were chaff but there was a lot more information than at Summize.
Of course, rock polishers are not exactly high on the popularity lists so I tried searching for iPhone reviews. Summize found several hundred relevant items and four or five hundred not so relevant items. An entry “iPhone review” at Google gave 157,000,000 results. And there you see the possible advantage of the specialized search engine. It doesn’t bury you with so many results that the search is useless. However, Google is usually (but not always) very good at what it chooses to put in the first 100 or so results. The first 100 for iPhone included some heavyweights like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNET, and Ars Technica.
But perhaps that is not what you’re looking for. If you want to skip what the professional reviewers say and want to know what Joe and Jane Average think, then the specialized searches may be better. What Joe or Jane say will likely be so buried at Google that you’ll never see it.
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