Collected Critics Building Biggest Database Of Reviews On The Web

Collected Critics – a UK based tech startup – is building what it claims will be the biggest database of reviews and product news on the internet.

By spidering and analyzing millions of web pages, tweets, and social media interactions, the site is creating an unparalleled collection of news, opinion, pictures and video. The service allows consumers to make informed choices about tech products that goes beyond the hype, and helps them instantly gain comprehensive insight into the products that they intend to purchase. The company wants to become the first stop for consumers looking for an unbiased summary of product quality and value.

Collected Critics already features thousands of consumer technology products – a number that is growing quickly by the day. Each product lists hundreds of reviews, videos, pictures and tweets from around the web – and lets consumers submit their own reviews about products that they own.

Jamie Jin, founder of Collected Critics says: “There have been big technical challenges pulling all of this data together. We have a cluster of servers running 24×7 on Amazon EC2, crawling and analyzing content from around the web to build meaningful pages that are immediately helpful to consumers. We’ve put a lot of time and effort into building matching and prioritizing algorithms that ensure that we’re getting the right reviews against the right products in the most meaningful order.”

Jin adds: “We hope that over time it won’t just be the algorithms that help us build the site. Every tweet, picture, review and video on the site has a vote button, and users can submit their own reviews, so we’re hoping that we can continuously refine and improve these pages through user interaction and crowd sourcing. But in the meantime, we’re doing all of the hard work with technology.”

By indexing and analyzing reviews, news and tweets, Collected Critics is already building a powerful mine of social media reporting data. The Collected Critics site currently features lists of trending products, and the all time top 30 products, showing at a glance what the most important products are at the current time. The company hopes to build this out over time into a comprehensive suite of trend insights.

Jin points out that they’re only at the start of a long journey: “The Collected Critics project has still got a lot to do. We have only just started indexing, and have already collected millions of data points and scraped hundreds of thousands of pages. We’re planning to build the site out horizontally over time – not just focusing on tech, but on other consumer products too. Now that we’ve proven the technology, we’re ready to take it to the next level. We hope that this can be the go-to place for all consumer reviews in the medium term.”

Collected Critics can be accessed on computers or mobile phones at:
http://www.collectedcritics.com/

Twitter users can follow Collected Critics at @collectcritics.

You can see those trending products here:
http://www.collectedcritics.com/lists/

For an example of what Collected Critics can do, check out their iPhone 5 page here:
http://www.collectedcritics.com/product/apple-iphone-5/

Or the Windows 8 page:
http://www.collectedcritics.com/product/microsoft-windows-8/