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Don’t Buy Junk.com
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
September 26 2005
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For budding Internet entrepreneurs Andrew Holt and Rishi Khaitan, building
a better mousetrap was the key component in their vision of the upstart
comparison search engine dontbuyjunk.com. Behind the sparse front page is
a wealth of products, information and consumer recommendations on a wide
array of consumer and business electronic goods. Searchers are offered a
number of comparative tools to change and narrow results, ranging from general
price and product-specifications, to much more specific details relevant
to each product type.
Like many other IT workers, Andrew and Rishi are electronics enthusiasts
who know how to find product information quickly and can rap tech-specs
off the tips of their tongues. They are therefore considered experts in
all things electronic by their friends and families, an honor of sorts that
can quickly become a major burden around Christmastime or when a product
recommendation goes awry.
Andrew and Rishi saw a significant hole in a growing marketplace and decided
to develop a search engine that provides “product recommendations
in the same manner a highly knowledgeable friend might.” Faced with
a hole in the market, they did what any talented risk-taking techies should
do; they built their own solution. In the process, they developed an engine
designed to consider a question based on how they themselves would work
through a product recommendation. This month, they felt they had finally
reached their goals of creating an easy to use product comparison engine
which is also complex enough to offer excellent advice to almost any individual
user.
As their thinking goes, they would first consider what other people had
told them about a specific product. They would then likely recall and reread
articles they had spotted that mentioned the product. The personal needs
and preferences of the person asking for the recommendation would also be
fuel for consideration.
The best way to describe the search tool is to invite readers on a product
search tool. I am looking for a new laptop computer. Fortunately, this is
one of the ten most searched for product types and DontBuyJunk.com has a
handy icon representing its laptop category on the front page. I click on
it and am taken to a page that is divided into three columns. The left hand
column contains tools to narrow my search. The center column contains search
results. The right hand column contains two ranking scores, rated on a scale
of 1 – 10, generated by users and reviews found on the web.
Let’s start with the center column, which for my initial search displayed
9 immediate results with images to the left with product information in
the middle and to the right. This column was divided into three rows. The
first offered 20 results for Ultra-portable laptops, displaying the first
three. The second row offered 71 results for mainstream or typical laptops,
again displaying the first three. The third row offered 30 results for desktop
replacement laptops with the top three results displayed.
The column to the right shows product ratings derived from direct-user
reviews and from reviews published in 200-odd sources drawn from the tech-media.
Scoring user and professional reviewer opinions on a scale from 1 – 10
might seem easy, if the reviewers wrote their reviews using a numeric system.
Unfortunately for Holt and Khaitan, they don’t. That necessitated
the creation of a complex algorithm referred to as TotalRank.
TotalRank finds and extracts keywords and phrases used to express an author’s
opinion of specific products and their attributes. These phrases are quoted
on product results pages. They are also assigned a value based on how the
author describes a particular product or product attribute, the stated battery
life of a particular laptop for example. Using a simple scale consisting
of, “Very Negative, Negative, Neutral, Positive, and Very Positive”,
a numeric value is assigned to that phrase in relation to the product. All
ratings for all attributes of a particular product are then mixed, sorted,
weighted and scored to produce the TotalRank score.
Search results are altered and ultimately narrowed using the features found
on the left hand side of the screen. The first is the price range slider
that allows the searcher to sort search results based on the cost of items.
The second is a general attributes box that asks the searcher to specify
product attributes that are of particular importance to them. For example,
I am very concerned with how long the batteries on my laptop can operate
between charges. I am also concerned with reliability and with ergonomics.
By selecting the general attributes I am most interested in, my search is
narrowed considerably.
DontBuyJunk takes the narrowing of search results much further than general
attributes, allowing me the option of telling it exactly what I need in
a laptop. Another feature allows me to choose results that based on: Screen
size, resolution, aspect ratio, processor class, processor speed, installed
memory, wireless attributes, stated battery life, h/d capacity, optical
drive type, USB ports, peripheral connectors, OS, and the manufacturer.
Surprisingly, colour and flavour weren’t options.
Just to remind folks, my birthday is coming up in a few weeks. By using
DontBuyJunk.com, I have found the new laptop I truly need and have conveniently
distributed the search results page the engine produced to family and friends.
That page will be very helpful to them as it lists a great deal of product
information, laid out using five easy to follow tabs.
The first tab shows general product information under four headings The
Good, The Average, The Bad, and Not Sure. Each of these headings shows where
specific attributes of the product might fall. For instance, while the laptop
I found excels in battery life and reliability as noted under The Good heading
but the gaming performance seems to fall under The Bad. The business performance
is Average as is the audio quality. The second tab is labelled specs and
offers highly detailed technical specifications. The third tab displays
user reviews and the fourth displays web reviews. The fifth and final tab
lists a number of places to purchase the product online. Shopping.Com currently
feeds this information.
DontBuyJunk.Com is a better mousetrap. Having built what is arguably the
most complex product comparison engine to date, Holt and Khaitan hope to
see it adopted by electronics consumers who want a simple and quick solution
for finding exactly the right products.
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