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?
