Summize: a way to consider many product reviews at once

Regular readers know that we're always looking for ways to cope with what we call The Tyranny of Too Much. That tyranny becomes particularly difficult to handle when considering products to buy, movies to see, or books to curl up with. Yes, there are gazillions of online reviews of such. The bad news: there are gazillions of online reviews to wade through.

Enter Summize.com. It lets its robots do the Google-like Web walking of all those reviews and boils those reviews down to a single graphic called a "snip" that reflects the overall sentiment about that product. Green is positive, red is negative, just as you'd expect. So if you look up digital cameras, you get a nice overview of all the popular models. Already decided you want a Canon camera? Search for that and you get a quick comparison of all those models.

Now if you're one of those who doesn't like to go with the populist opinions (I know you are out there; you know who you are), there are other options. You can, for example, only look at products that others dislike or that reviewers disagree on. And in fact, the only feature I've found myself missing off the bat is the ability to sort the results by the number of reviews summarized (or summized, as I suspect summize.com would want me to say, even though it isn't a word). I thought the site also was missing the ability to sort by the overall rating, but it turns out that if you only display products people like, it is sorted by rating (which becomes more evident if you display by "star" ratings rather than "snips").

But regardless of that nit, in this crazed holiday buying season, Summize.com deserves a place in your bookmarks for that emergency last-minute decision on which book Uncle Henry really would like best or which holiday movie you should go see to get out of the house. It really does a good job of taming the tyranny of too many reviews and leaves you more time to focus on enjoying the holidays too much instead.


Thanks to TechCrunch for recommending Summize.com.

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