Buzzillions.com

Feb 15, 2011

Posted You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Book Is About You In the same space as Buzzillions and Viewpoints , a new consumer review aggregator SearchReviews unveils itself today, allowing users to tailor searches to its over 40 million consumer reviews for over 4 million products from 1,011 retailers like ebay, Sephora, Walmart, Amazon and Zappos. User reviews are increasingly becoming akin to a form of UGC advertising and SearchReviews is attempting to take advantage of this by launching what is by far the largest searchable review hub available to consumers. SearchReviews is also available on iPhone and Android, allowing customers to access information about products in store with the scan of a barcode in addition to manual search. Curious in-store searchers can scan a code and/or look for the name of a product or service like a Canon Printer and drill down even further into specific attributes like star rating, source, location and specific key words with a tag cloud. You might find yourself confused without these further refinements as the quantity of reviews greatly outweighs the quality. Says founder Ankesh Kumar on the ambitious goal of being a one-stop shop for reviews, “A little prepurchase research goes a long way as it brings all available reviews together in one place, so consumers don’t have to wander from site to site or sort through a jumble of irrelevant information.” Sometimes SearchReviews can seem like a jumble itself: The app is missing some crucial elements including geolocation and the ability to search by date and specific store. Also reviews like the following for the iPhone weren’t particularly useful on the web version. I’m hoping that these kinks can be worked out in subsequent updates as the ultimate utility of being able to pull up customer reviews is huge . SearchReviews is aiming adding 2 million reviews each week and hopes to hit 100 million reviews in 2011. The company is bootstrapped with $350K in funding from Kumar who demonstrates how it works below.