Froogle Adds Product Reviews
With nine days left in the holiday shopping season, Froogle has added product reviews to aid customers in their purchases. In typical Google fashion, the whole service is powered by algorithms, not people, as a Google crawler picks up the reviews from other sites, such as Bizrate.com, Circuit City and CNET, and attaches them to select popular products, like the iPod and the Playstation 2. The idea is you can now search Froogle for generic products and use the review to find out which one is better. The review page is very cool, with color coded alert levels and "hot topics". The hot topics are quite useful; you click on a set of words that the crawler has found in a large number of the reviews, and Froogle zeroes in on the reviewers who considered "battery life" to be important, and what they said. Gotta love that.
(via Cnet, Search Engine Journal, and Greg Linden)

Postscript - Guess what? Gary was right!
- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 12/16/2004 09:05:00 PM