CrunchGear

Gadget reviews are tough nuts to crack. Each news source has their own bias - the camera geeks will pan a point-and-shoot while the mainstream folks like Newsweek will rave about it, if they write about it at all - so an aggregator like ViewScore makes a lot of sense.

Think of this site as the metacritic.com of gadgets. They have a fairly healthy selection of gear, from the Canon Rebel XT to the Nokia N90. The site then crawls the web - namely a few major review sites - and grabs the pertinent scores and information.

Now this is the trick to the whole system - it doesn’t just grab the 1-10 numerical scores. ViewScores patented process actually parses the review for positive and negative language and uses that to produce the majority of its final score. That’s right - they have a robo-critic who distills reviews to their barest essentials and then figures out if the reviewer hated the product or was raving about it.

“We took a Sony press release and put it into the system and it got the highest score because everything was positive,” said Ami Zivov, CTO of the Tel Aviv-based company. “But when we put in a professional review, it gets a mix of positive and negative.”

The site also obviously has sale links near the bottom and usually creates a set of 5 or six scores and allows you to “suggest” a review to be added into the mix. Finally, you get an average score (between 1 and 100) and a star score and general “mood” score (”Good”, “Excellent”) for those so inclined.

The database is fairly hefty right now, with quite a few gadgets already processed and ranked. ViewScore lets you can find a set of professional reviews in a concentrated space, thereby alleviating the standard “Click-on-splog-sites-until-I-find-a-review” syndrome and that kind of makes my day.

ViewScore