I don't think the comparison to Rotten Tomatoes makes sense because you aren't aggregating professional reviews of these products. To me it is just another product review site tackling a niche.
But the idea of tracking cost per month is very intriguing (a measure of TCO, which you may want to tackle as well, because for some products that may include electricity usage, upkeep, etc). I think it is something that can truly differentiate, and can appeal to everyone, not just people that are concerned with reducing their environmental footprint.
> because you aren't aggregating professional reviews of these products
outdoorgearlab.com looks like a professional review site to me in the context of being an affiliate marketing / review site. IMHO almost all reviews online are affiliate marketing these days, so what I'd really be interested in is a site that hosts reviews and doesn't allow _any_ affiliate marketing or external links. IE: No incentive to game the system with inflated review scores.
And if you pay attention to those affiliate marketing sites that are disguised as review sites, note how they never give anything a bad review. "Poisoned my dog, caused my house to be condemned - 4.0/5.0 stars." Getting you to buy _something_ is the only goal.
How to build the next Google: all good results these days are within communities, and Google search has become useless for most of these searches.
So don't build a search engine: build a "rotten tomatoes for X" where the sources for each X are "the top N subreddits/communities/editorial-sites/forums for X".
For example, supplements: examine.com, reddit /r/supplements /r/nootropics (long tail ones), wikipedia, etc.
Then, final piece: make this aggregator site also a community (ala reddit/hn) where people vote on the results rankings, but also vote on how other people comment on them. Because you can lock down user accounts quite a bit (have high bar for registration with lots of verification for voting permissions), and you have a quality indictor for the users themselves (users voting on users), you may get much better results over time as the community sorts out who are legit and who isn't.
I'm not saying any system is immune to optimization/spam, but it feels like Reddit, HN, SO, Wikipedia at least prove that if you want good quality content, rely on a community. Why not extend the model to search itself?
I think wikipedia, HN, etc. are less suseptible because people don't use those sites as heavily to make purchasing decisions. Any community that helps with purchasing will be targeted by those interested in sales who figure out how to meet the "high bar" no matter what that may be. Even purchase verification isn't high enough these days (see recent unsolicited package scams such as the seeds from China).
I agree with you: It's a numbers game. There is a cost associated with driving up good reviews for a (bad) product. A website such as this has to cause higher costs for fake reviews than what they can reap via it.
However, at some point the whole review process might become unusable for legitimate users, resulting in too few reviews, rendering the whole endeavour futile.
E.g. if a shitty product earns a seller 20US$, and they expect to sell exactly 100 more over a site like this, then they can easily invest 1000 US$ into trying to make their product seem good, even if it isn't.
Thinking of this, by that reasoning a non-negligible part of the high cost of good quality products might also stem from the fact that advertising genuinely good quality must be expensive like hell (I guess).
I had a similar idea: build a kind of "stackexchange" of search engines.
You start with a "generic" search engine infrastructure, and each community runs its own instance, tweaked accordingly.
This would mean:
* The community chooses what goes in the search database, the rules for the crawler etc.
* People in the community can vote on stuff, etc.
* The engine can be customized to have some "semantic" understanding of what is scraped (i.e. on a math-oriented instance, it would understand latex, in a cooking one, it would be able to parse recipes if they respect schema.org).
I really believe in this kind of concept of "user curated, community oriented" search engine, since this means taking pretty much the opposite approach to what google does, thus:
* this wouldn't compete on google's own ground ==> higher chances of success.
* you could keep more control on the data
* the engine wouldn't pull any tricks on you by trying to overfit what you meant
* lots of customization options, etc.
But I never had the energy to try and start something with the idea…
outdoorgearlab.com ? you must be kidding me, in their reviews, they leave out ~50% of competition, and their sorting of best product in category is apparently a bidding game, shifted just right to make the results believable. I do spent lots of time on researching outdoor products for my own needs, and outdoorgearlab.com is a joke
OGL used to be great. They didn't get to where they are because of scumminess. However, the quality has dropped in the last few years, and they do seem to be more influenced by affiliate marketing these days.
Straight up paid astroturfing is probably more lucrative and less obvious than affiliate links - It just requires more co-operation between the marketer and the salesman.
I keep on seeing this link pop up. Since no one is replying, I'd like to point out that I think the Wirecutter is actually in the right here. Another HN member did some investigation and found that Xdesk is stretching things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144078
In general, having been able to talk with some of the people there, I'm convinced that WC was focused first and foremost on truth-seeking and quality at this point in their life (pre-acquisition) — however, the consensus seems to have been that after the NYT acquired them, they started becoming more incentivized to grow revenue, and started to jump the shark.
I do not see a mention to kickbacks which is the main issue NextDesk raised with multiple emails then wire cutter responded then deleted the response.
It’s hard to find a product recommend without an affiliate link. Many recommendations have several comments about why they did not bother to review X cheaper or well known item.
My bad, I had clicked on several products (5 or so) that didn't have pro reviews. I went back and was able to find some with pro reviews. Seems like they need to beef this end up considerably if this is going to be a differentiator.
As mentioned below, I'm indeed aggregating professional reviews from different sources like Wirecutter or Gearlabs, there is just not that much data yet.
However, this should not be the core focus. After getting enough product submissions from users, I will focus on the cost per month metric. As you said, this could be the true differentiator.
If you could talk about TCO as in service costs associated, that would be amazing. I.e. A PS4 costs $300.. but after PS+ service costs (to use the features they give you).. that's something like $5/month extra.
But the idea of tracking cost per month is very intriguing (a measure of TCO, which you may want to tackle as well, because for some products that may include electricity usage, upkeep, etc). I think it is something that can truly differentiate, and can appeal to everyone, not just people that are concerned with reducing their environmental footprint.