Aggregating & Making Sense of Product Reviews in Blogs

A few days ago Jon and I had the opportunity to speak with Vaibhav Domkundwar, the founder of iNods, a search engine for product reviews aimed at the consumer "pain points" related to finding information about products.  I am interested in iNods and other vertical search engines in the product research space because it is interesting to see how each tries to make sense of the extensive product review information scattered around the internet.  The challenge is identifying and separating the quality content from the spam, which is something iNods takes very seriously.  The iNods approach is to limit the size of the index and incorporate manual identification of quality reviews. The idea is that at the very least the aggregated reviews will be more useful than the reviews provided through Amazon or epinions.  Vaibhav has thoughts about all of these issues and it sounds like we will be seeing a stream of enhancements to iNods through the rest of the year. For example, I look forward to seeing how iNods will help enable bloggers and contributors of reviews online to monetize their content.  Certainly if bloggers start creating more content to be indexed by a vertical engine, other search engines can also index that material.  I am interested in seeing how product review engines will try to contain this value for themselves.

I am interested to see how iNods and other vertical engines in this space deal with the issues of trust and identity.  It is definitely way too early to pick likely winners in this space, which is really separate  from the comparison shopping engine space because there are no product prices listed in results.  One thing is clear: there are many potential avenues for innovation, and it will be fun to see how different engines approach the problem.  We look forward to keeping tabs on iNods as well as other vertical search engines as they innovate and seek to develop sustainable competitive edges. 

On the call we discussed iNods and other developments in the product search space.  You can get the podcast by clicking here (MP3, 8.33MB).  Thank you to Vaibhav for joining us on the call.

Comments

[Vaibhav Domkundwar - iNods.com]

Thanks for writing about us, Doug.

One thing I wanted to point out is that we aggregate a lot of reviews content and right now most of that content is on websites (most are affiliate sites) and not blogs as such, though we expect the review content on blogs to increase exponentially in the coming months and years.

Stay tuned for the new developments on the iNods blog.

Best,
-Vaibhav

[Richard Anson]

Enjoyed the podcast and really interesting to hear Vaibhav’s vision on how they plan on differentiating themselves from the likes of “become”:http://www.become.com/.

Thought it was worth highlighting two other players tackling this issue of review availability from a slightly different angle. “Kritx”:http://www.kritx.com/ and at the risk of self promotion, ourselves, “Reevoo”:http://www.reevoo.com/. We have both developed blog aggregation features which enable bloggers to publish reviews at a central site. Certainly on Reevoo, we aim to address the issue of trust and identity by always displaying the provenance of reviews; in other words publishing a clear link back to the orginal blog. People researching a product and reading a review can then visit the blog to understand a bit more about the type of person the blogger is, whether they have the same interests – in other words, whether they are “people like themselves” – and hence the relevancy of the review.