Review: Summize
As a product review connoisseur myself, I immediately became interested in Summize when it first took wind. Summize is a trend-tracking, review-aggregating, verdict-visualizing product review portal of sorts, with the focus being on their unique information visualization methods.
Why I Like It
The chaps behind Summize understand the blogosphere and Internet culture. As such, they’re not trying to get people to write reviews on their site and become another venue you must scour to find great product reviews. Rather they want Summize to be the only place you visit when searching for reviews. They don’t require that you alter the way you write reviews or install any blog plugins if you’re a blogger. They just take what’s already out there and filter out the noise. Well, at least that is the end goal. I don’t think they’re quite there yet.
Needs Improvement
Summize gets all of its information from the net, particularly Amazon reviews and the blogosphere. Once Summize has found a blog review of a certain product, it carries out natural language processing to approximate the tone of the review and give it a “sentiment” or visual rating of sorts. For Amazon reviews, the user-supplied star rating is just used.
The problem with this is that there is not yet anyway for Summize to rate the quality of the review other than just the language used. For example, what is the difference to the system between a splog post of a press release and a full-fledged blog review as you might read here? Through my experience, nothing yet. All types of blog reviews are unfortunately treated the same. I got in touch with Summize CEO Jay Virdy about this to which he replied with the following:
We are also actively working on improving our review
classifier to more accurately identify full-fledged reviews versus plain
mentions versus splogs versus paid reviews. Your detailed and helpful
reviews are exactly the type of edge reviews we want to highlight on
Summize.I really like your idea about giving active and helpful bloggers control
to moderate some of our pages. We actually have a voting mechanism in
development, but we haven’t fully worked out the details.
For the blog reviews that Summize doesn’t automatically pick up on its own, registered users can add reviews manually. Here’s a screenshot of when I added one of my own reviews:
You can see here how Summize went through the review and analyzed each of the words, comparing them to presumably a word bank sorted by tone/sentiment. Summize can then take an educated guess at the outcome of your review. However, it’s not bulletproof. For example, in my Vudu box review I spent some time focusing on the negatives of the unit but overall I pretty much liked it. Summize classified that as “wretched”. I’ll check back with Summize in a few months and see where it’s at but I’ve already found myself using it more and more.
When you’re searching for a particular product review, where do you head first? Where would you head if all major search engines were down?
That’s pretty cool, I may use this in the future. I typically Google my way to reviews, and sometimes check out the ones at Newegg or Amazon for any specific product. I also try to ask friends that own it too.
I somehow got this ad after this page loaded. Came here from google reader, and the ad opened about 30 seconds or so later.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=71ec0up&s=1
I like Amazon’s system pretty well on its own. Then I actually read individual reviews, on Amazon or formal review sites. I never look at a number and base anything on that. So, I don’t know how useful this will be for me unless they are really good at collecting every last review on the internet of a product. I suppose it will be really nice if someday all reviews are done with microformats to identify them as such. Then you could have a search engine that just picked out reviews for whatever you’re searching for, display an aggregate rating, and so on.
If all the search engines went down, I'd head for the bomb shelter. But seriously, Amazon is a good place to <em>start</em> looking for product reviews. The best source is usually the specialty sites: who doesn't love preaching to the choir.
I think it is a good idea, but if it linked the word ‘wretched’ is linked to your review than it does not do anything for me that I cannot do myself. I will still have to check each review individually to see what was actually said. If issues like that can be worked out it could be a great tool, but for now nothing beats a little time and Google.
Yep, an ad open after i visited your site. I hope you site didn’t get hacked.
Hrm, I’ve been looking into this but I can’t reproduce it.. any more info guys?
I also got the ad, I tried reproducing it, incase it was simply a case of my own system doing the dirty, but seen as others have mentioned it too….
I got one pop up, http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/product.do?id=11039&buspart=directresponsedisplay
Not sure what it was, but only got it once. Doesn’t pop up right away though- and worryingly in Firefox 2 on Windows, not in IE 6.
I am getting the ad as well.. It seems to be timed.
Thanks for the detailed writeup, Paul (and for the helpful feedback, Mike S., Andrew, Brandon, Justin above).
We launched a new version of Summize earlier this week which no longer treats all blog posts the same. Our goal is to help people locate the absolute best reviews out there without having to slog through tons of reviews. Here’s an update of the Summize Vudu page with the latest changes:
http://www.summize.com/product/vudu-box/vudu–inc/b000vemjfy
Note that this page is algorithmically created using our Sentiment Engine technology. (I’ll be happy to walk you through our technology if you are interested.) We have more enhancements in the pipeline that will address “review fatigue” problem as well as “blogger discovery” problem for users.
Again, thanks for the post.
Jay Virdy
CEO
Summize, Inc.