Many Internet users research a product (e.g., a Canon digital camera) or a service (e.g., a hotel room in Hawaii) before obtaining it. Currently, the approach that many users follow is to use Internet search engines. Users issue a search query that contains the product or service name plus terms like “review” and sift through the myriad of results that are returned by the search engine. While some of these results do contain reviews about the product, many results do not. Moreover, it is very difficult to get a holistic view of all the reviews. In short, this process is fairly cumbersome, time consuming, and inefficient.
Alternatively, users may go to Web sites that provide reviews and ratings for products, such as www.amazon.com, www.epinions.com, and www.circuitcity.com. A few sites, such as www.rottentomatoes.com, movies.yahoo.com, and www.consumersearch.com, aggregate reviews for the same product from several sites. However, some of these sites aggregate reviews manually, which is very inefficient and limits the number of reviews that can be gathered for each product. Moreover, all of these sites are very limited in the tools they provide users to navigate through the reviews.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide tools that enable users to more efficiently conduct research on the products and services they are interested in obtaining (e.g., by purchase, lease, rental, or other similar transaction).