SearchReviews – Fastest way to Search Product Reviews

There is no dearth of Product review websites and aggregators on the internet. Services like Google Places, TestFreaks, Retrevo and Buzzilions have been around for a long time now. The latest entrant, SearchReviews promises to be the real search engine for product reviews with more than 40 million reviews of 4 million products, indexed from 1000+ retailers like eBay, Walmart, Amazon and others.

Where SearchReviews is Different?

The basic approach of SearchReviews is similar to other product review aggregators. It crawls and indexes thousands of reliable websites for review content and stores them in their searchable database. Where it differs from its competition is in the mix of review content. Ranging from shoes to electronics and restaurants to travel, it has everything you would think of. What’s even more interesting about SearchReviews are the mobile apps available for both iPhone and Android.

Both iPhone and Android apps are integrated with the bar code scanner from RedLaser. When you are in Walmart or BestBuy and not sure how good a particular product is, just take out your smartphone, open SearchReviews app and scan the barcode of the product to get hundreds and thousands of user reviews for that particular model!

Having said that, the app isn’t perfect. Though it lets you browse several user reviews aggregated as a list, there is no filter provided to dig down to the specific source or geo-location of the user who had reviewed it. It also doesn’t let us choose only the 1-star or 5-stars reviews, which is again very important to make instant decisions. I really wish they come out with the improved version of the apps soon enough.
The web version though, is much better as it has all those filters I was asking for. But the UI needs a major overhaul. Retrevo has one of the best UIs amongst the product review aggregators. It segregates the expert reviews from the user reviews which is again very helpful from a consumer point of view.
For its credit, SearchReviews indexes the review content in addition to product names. So you can look for the specifics like “spicy indian food washington” and still get relevant search results. They need to improve their spelling corrections and suggestions though. Polishing these little rough edges will surely make SearchReviews an ultimate utility.