Swotti - A Semantic Opinions Aggregator

Written by Sarah Perez / March 21, 2008 10:08 AM / 0 Comments

Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. With Swotti, you can learn from the good and bad experiences of others as the site gathers together reviews and feedback from across the web and categorizes them to provide you with more information about the product you're interested in. What's unique about this search engine is that it uses semantics to do so.

There isn't a lot of info about Swotti on their main site - no FAQ, no blog, no how-to section; it's just a search box on a white page. But as you begin typing, search suggestions appear underneath the search box, making it easier to find what you're looking for. Click on search and you'll be taken to a product reviews page, where you'll be amazed at the amount of data displayed.

Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Take the iPhone for example - each review is tagged with keywords like Design, Usability, Display, Reliability, Noise, Battery, Service, Camera, Keypad, Size, etc. Based on the number of positive reviews for a tag, a rating for that feature is given. Bar charts show green bars for good, yellow for average, or red for bad reviews. And they seem to be pretty accurate, at least for the iPhone - "design" is 5 green bars, "speed" is 3 red bars.

There is even a pie chart that summarizes the views. In the iPhone example, 15% said "I Love," 11% said "Too Expensive," 11% said "Worst." (Note to those who hated your iPhones: please send them this way.)

Product images display on the left and the reviews themselves, linked to the original source, display on the right. The reviews can also be sorted to display the best reviews, the worst, or the most relevant. Beneath the sorting options, the number of reviews display.

iPhone Results in Swotti

What's interesting is that this data seems to have been collected, tagged, and rated using only Swotti's technology. This isn't Mahalo - no user-intervention here - it's all automated.

One problem with the site seems to the be with the English spellings of things and wording, like "Adjective" was spelled "Adjetive." Since the site is also offered in Spanish, its likely that the Spanish version was created first and this is an English translation. However, this is only a minor drawback.

Whether it gets it right all the time - that's the real issue. The problems lies in similarly named products, obviously something that is still being sorted out. For example, a search for the Lenovo x300 also returned results for the Dell Latitude x300. I couldn't filter out the Dell results by using -dell in my query a la Google, as that returned a "No enough opinions" result (Yep, that's the English again).

Clicking on "Are you unsatisfied with your results? Help us" gave me a Spanish entry form which returned a bunch of code when I submitted my comments...although at the bottom it did say "Gracias por haber dado tu opinion," so maybe it went through anyway.

Altough these issues would have to be worked out for the site to became mainstream, it doesn't deduct from Swotti's potential - Swotti is reading, categorizing, and rating data from the web on its own. A great concept which hopefully will get better with time. Definitely worth watching.