Summize Blog

William Hung: Love Him or Hate Him

Today we released a new beta feature on Summize that let's you quickly see the products people love, hate, and disagree on.

Let's jump right into an example.  First, search for rock music cds:

Which retrieves a list 529,321 reviews on over 20,000 products!  That's a lot of reviews to read if we're just trying to find some new music to check out.

Now notice the beta feature in the right-hand column labeled "Read enough reviews?". Clicking "what people love" quickly re-orders the products to show you just the rock CDs that people love:

The majority greenness of the snips is a conspicuous indicator that most people agree with each other about the high quality of this music — other sites would give these CDs "five stars".  Conversely, if you click "what people hate" you will see the music everyone generally agrees is bad (i.e., "one star").

But check out the snippet for OK Computer in the screenshot above: it says, "people are all different and have different likes and opinions".  For many types of products, such as music, what the "crowd" thinks may not reflect your own tastes, or the product features that are most important to you.

So click on "what people disagree on":

The snips say it all: you can immediately see that user opinion is divided on these products, with William Hung's album topping the list as the CD people disagree about the most.  Other sites would average out this polarizing love and hate to arrive at an average "three star" rating, and bury the CD far down in the search results.

On Summize, however, we highlight this CD as a quintessential example of why we write reviews in the first place: to express our individual opinions. Disagreement does not make a product average; rather, products that foment the crowd's disagreement are often the products that we are most passionate about as individuals.  We predict you will either love or hate William Hung's... music — only 8% of people said it was just "OK".

This feature is still in beta (meaning we get it wrong sometimes), but as disagreement is such an essential ingredient of user reviews, we felt our site would not be complete without it.  Please give us your feedback as we continue to improve.

People Change Their Minds Over Time

In this post I will show a few examples of how user sentiment changes over time.  A recent post on the VentureBeat blog describes a company that collects reviews immediately after a purchase is made.  Collecting reviews so near the point-of-sale can be helpful, but the consumer doesn't yet have enough experience with the product to say what's truly good or bad.

For example, consider the Epson Stylus CX5400 printer.  Initially, users were very happy with this printer: one of the reviews was titled "Epson CS5400 Rocks!".  However, after a few months of use this printer started to show its true colors, and owning it went from a joy to a pain in the view of users: the ink jets started clogging up, rendering the printer useless.  Look how the sentiment changed over time in the buzz histogram below:

Electronics are not the only examples where initial views changed over time.  Games are another example, for example, consider Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. Again early users loved it as "Not just another Hack n' Slash MMORPG".

But, after the manufacturer upgraded the back-end, the sentiment of users changed: "Before the Combat Upgrade this game was really fun for me."

User sentiments for popular web sites also change over time.  In 2004, one user wrote of Neopets.com, "The best site on the web! Better then Nick.com".  By 2006 the sentiment of users changed to "Don't waste your time."  Digging into the reviews, you quickly see that most of the dissatisfaction revolved around the staff. 

While collecting reviews from people soon after a purchase reveals insight into the immediate satisfaction of their decisions, that satisfaction often changes over time. 

This post is really just tip of the iceberg of interesting trends in user sentiment.

Happy summizing.