PowerReviews blows away Amazon reviews

PowerReviews, about which I had written and referenced number of times before, has finally gone live with its product reviews portal now branded as Buzzillions. From the few minutes I spent playing with the site, I would say PowerReviews has the potential to get Amazon customers hooked onto Buzzillions that is powered with the huge number of reviews for majority of the products.

Earlier I spent time talking with Andy and Robert from PowerReviews about the launch and the UI enhancements introduced. PowerReviews has taken the tag/attribute based product search concept a bit further by starting to incorporate affinity based questions to get you started. So if you are out in the market for a new digital camera, Buzzillions can guide you through set of questions that you typically might be asked in a store – Who am I?, How will I use it?, What do I like?, What do I dislike? All these questions are than mapped to the reviews(which were in turn asked to the reviewers to start with) and product metadata to filter down to the right product. A pretty smart and efficient process I would say. Currently the methodology is available for few product categories like Digital Cameras and Womens Shoes, while PowerReviews teams works out the details for rest of them.

Buzzillions also comes with another smart idea of being able to compare brands. So, while you are out searching for Womens shoes and pretty much clueless about how to distinguish brands, Buzzillions brand compare can solve the problem for you and give you stats that you might find tough to get anywhere else. Also to browse through faster, Buzzillions has added “enlarge” button below each product that gives you the product snapshot without the need to load the page.

If you are wondering how Buzzillions is getting all these reviews at the very launch itself, you need to know the real business of PowerReviews. PowerReviews hosted review engine delivers the functionality for users to add review for products at merchant sites without the merchant getting bothered about building and maintaining such a system. Some of the big name merchants and companies partnering with PowerReviews to take advantage of this free service includes Ritz Cameras, Adorama, GreenMountainCoffee, Wolf Camera, and GSI Commerce. In all, around 100 manufacturers and retailers till date. So, PowerReviews is taking this homegrown SaaS based review engine to the fullest advantage in delivering as high as 100+ reviews for some of the products.

Scrolling couple of pages down to get to the reviews at Amazon no longer works for me. Personally i will be moving over to Buzzillions for any product research i need to do, as Amazon continues to venture away from realities of the times.
Links:
Buzzillions