VentureBeat

Have you ever searched for product reviews online at and come away unsatisfied?

We have. Sometimes we can’t find reviews for a niche product. At Amazon for books, or at Yelp for restaurants, we often get that sneaky feeling a reviewer is biased (written by a friend of the author, or owner). And for cameras or computers at CNET or Yahoo, we’re not sure whether the revenue is targeted to an expert, or beginner. We’re dependent on the reviewer, and don’t know what the masses think.

Enter Buzzillions.com, a new site that claims to rectify these shortcomings. Judging from its stated traction, it is on to something.

Buzzillions gets its reviews from retail clients of its parent company, Power Reviews, a two-year-old Millbrae, Ca. company. Power Reviews gets the reviews in return for offering retailers technology that helps generate reviews. Each retailer sends out a survey after a purchase is made, asking the buyer to rate their product, and to provide other information. If they bought a camera, for example, they’re asked whether they are a beginner or expert photographer. These products are then put on Buzzillions. This way, a person surfing reviews at Buzzillion can search for reviews written people that match their own interests.

See below for partial screenshot. Note the users get to “tag” a product with certain words, and list pros and cons.

Buzzillions makes money charging retailers for the traffic it sends back to them when people click through to products after reading reviews. It charges either by CPC or CPA.

Over four months of testing, Buzzillions.com has generated more than 140,000 reviews on 45,000 products, covering primarily digital cameras, sporting goods, footwear and concerts and theater events. Its customers include Ritz Camera, Abt Electronics, Smart Bargains, Mountain Gear, Journeys. By year end, it expects to double the number sites it pulls reviews from, chief executive Andrew Chen said in an interview with VentureBeat. The company released a launch statement Sunday evening.

By targeting actual buyers with surveys shortly after purchase, Buzzillions’ retailers reach buyers when they are still in a cooperative state in mind. This contrasts with Amazon or other review sites, such as Epinions, where there is little incentive for users to fill out review.

Most retailers have an incentive to maximize the number of reviews they get–even if some are negative–because the assortment builds trust. Studies show that customers are more likely to buy at a site when they see both positive and negative reviews (they’re assured they’re not getting snowed). While Epinions collected two million reviews in eight years, Buzzillions will get a million reviews in a year, Chen said. By also catering to specialty retailers, Buzzillions has a wider a selection of reviews.

Other competitors include comparison shopping engines, such Shopping.com and Pricegrabber.com, which are introducing widgets for their retail partners to collect reviews, though still elementary. Become.com scrapes the Web for reviews, but it collects from everywhere: Some reviews are three stars, others have five, others none, so it has difficulty creating a unified feel. Google could enter the market. Amazon has added product wikis, and expanded reviews.

The company raised $6.2 million from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in December 2005, and will be raising another round in July.

Tomorrow, Buzzillions will introduce a feature that lets people add a review to their own blog.

Wize.com, a San Mateo start-up, has launched yet another search engine for consumer electronics and other goods.

Wize’s promise hangs on a single, skinny thread: Its “Wize Rank” concept. Wize Rank is a numeric ranking of products (from zero to 100). Each product is rated according to how well users and reviewers judge it, along with the buzz it’s getting. It is a cute play on Google’s concept of “Page Rank.” The exact “Wize Rank” formula is proprietary, and so not being published. This lack of transparency may cause some people to dismiss it, but then Google’s algorithm has remained secret too.

It is very late in the game to be launching new engines like this. Wize focuses on research, and joins a full field of players such as Become and Retrevo. We played a bit with Wize, and it doesn’t let you buy products directly, but directs you which vendors are selling them for the lowest price. Here, it also has competition in Shopping.com, Nextag, Thefind.com and Pricegrabber. (Update: ViewScore, of Tel Aviv, Israel, is doing the exact same thing as Wize, a reader points out below, making even less original than we thought. Meanwhile, other sites are doing something similar for specific niches, i.e., movies, games etc.).

And yet Wize has gotten $4 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners, a sign that the search engine sector — dominated by Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo — is so profitable that its worth gunning for a success even if the odds of doing so are very poor.

Here’s the basic Wize Rank equation:

Wize relies on 1,042,806 consumer product reviews of 17,668 products.

Its weakness is that it remains subjective like most other rating sources (why does “buzz” matter, for example?). Each user has different needs. Wize.com says we should consider its method similar to Wine Spectator’s scoring. But Wine Spectator’s tasting scores are quite subjective. WS’s scores became popular because it was one of the early players to rate wine. Perhaps Wize can win some respect for its numbering system, in which case it could become quite a success (there is less chance of this happening, now that we’ve seen Viewscore). Here is an example of a camera that has received a score of 100:

Wize CEO Tom Patterson was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield last year, the company said.