If you are a keen gadget user and online shopper, then you would be familiar with the experience of Googling your product of interest, checking out the product specification on the manufacturer’s website, trawling through online forums, reading all the online reviews about the product you can find and even having a pick at the product manual if you are really keen. Well, according to Retrevo, they can do all of the “CLICK WORKS” for you and save you from searching around the web so that you can focus on reading the relevant information.
Retrevo has been live Since late 2006 and has been continuously refining their services. I checked out their latest version recently and found it to be a fantastic service and they seem to have all the angles covered when it comes to product search.
I did a search for “SqueezeBox” which is a kick ass MP3 steamer from Logitech and Retrevo returned me a nice list of top results from review articles, forums, manufacturer info, heck it even returned me a screenshot of the product manual and a download link for the PDF file ! Pretty impressive. It even recognised that I am searching for some sort of MP3 player and suggest that I click on their top 10 MP3 players link.
You then have the options of drilling in and seeing more results from thee individual sections.
Click on the Top 10 MP3 Players link then takes me to a special product advisor page on MP3 Players
They seem to have compiled a list top products from various categories and ranked them based on scoring provided by the Retrevo user community. Great idea to leverage the social aspects of product searching and comparison, the results however is a bit interesting as I have never heard of the number 1 product presented here for MP3 player (Cowon D2) then again, maybe I am missing out on a fantastic product, maybe something I need to look into….
Just to check for their coverage of the latest products I did anther search for “HTC Touch Cruise” which is a smart phone that was due to be released around the world as I am typing this article, and here is the result I got.
No product manual provided but still a decent effort in terms of manufacturer’s info, reviews and blogs presented. I suspect there is a little bit of manual work required in the background to provide the full suite of information for each products.
Just in case you have been tempted by the overwhelming positive information you have seen on a particular product, Retrevo also provide direct link to the product page from various online vendors where you can purchase the product instantly. No surprise here as I also suspect this is one of their primary source for revenue.
Would I rely solely on the Retrevo service for my product research now ? NO, would I supplement (or even start my product research) on Retrevo ? Yes as it does do a good job of aggregating relevant contents (and links) into a single location and provide a good high level overview for a particular product.
For me, a search and scan through online product review is one of the most important aspects of searching about a product, and a quick search for “SqueezeBox Review” on Google gave me a result of which the top 3 does not even show up on Retrevo’s list of product reviews for SqueezeBox. This along will warrant me to at least always Google product reviews separately from Retrevo as when it comes to returning the best answer on a particular topic, I would rely on Google over Retrevo any day.
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