Wanted to share some nuggets of what I think is good in shopping search land. No, the eternal critic isn’t going soft, just want to point out some positive notes about this industry.
There are a ton of review sites and all the shopping engines incorporate product reviews in some way. But when I read reviews, I don’t just want to get a thumbs up or 4 stars out of 5, especially when the average product seems to have 4 out of 5 rating. What I love seeing are details. For example, if I’m looking at a touch screen phone, I’m probably interested in the screen. If I want to find specific reviews related to the screen, I’d usually have to search through hundreds of reviews, which is a total waste of time. That’s why I like Live Product Search’s take on reviews:
Notice the left hand nav. If you scroll down on that page, you’ll see you can look at reviews by attribute. Not just ease of use or screen, but battery life, affordability, software, connectivity, video, photo quality, etc. In fact, there are over 30 filters. Considering that there are so many window shoppers out there right now, this functionality is increasingly important for a good user experience. Now I don’t like that most of the reviews seem to be culled from eBay – I’d rather see a Google Product Search experience where reviews are culled from Checkout orders as well as tons of leading sources like CNET, Epinions, PriceGrabber, Buzzillions, PCWorld, etc.
Runner up for reviews is Buzzillions (which is now featured on Shopzilla). Not as strong as Live Product Search because you can’t filter by attribute, but at least you can see the breakdown of what consumers liked or didn’t like.
Posted by Brian Smith 
