Collected Critics builds the biggest database of reviews on the web

Sept. 30, 2012 - PRLog -- Collected Critics - a UK based tech startup - is building the biggest database of reviews and product news on the internet.  The site already features thousands of consumer technology products at http://www.collectedcritics.com/ - a number that is growing quickly by the day.  Each product lists hundreds of reviews, videos, pictures and tweets from around the web - and lets consumers submit their own reviews about products that they own.

Jamie Jin, the founder of Collected Critics says: "There have been big technical challenges pulling all of this data together. We have a cluster of servers running 24x7 on Amazon EC2, crawling and analysing content from around the web to build meaningful pages that are immediately helpful to consumers.  We've put a lot of time and effort into building matching and prioritising algorithms that ensure that we're getting the right reviews against the right products in the most meaningful order."

Jin adds: "We hope that over time it won't just be the algorithms that help us build the site.  Every tweet, picture, review and video on the site has a vote button, and users can submit their own reviews, so we're hoping that we can continuously refine and improve these pages through user interaction and crowdsourcing.  But in the meantime, we're doing all of the hard work with technology."

By indexing and analysing reviews, news and tweets, Collected Critics is already building a powerful mine of social media reporting data too.  The Collected Critics site currently features lists of trending products, and the all time top 30 products, showing at a glance what the most important products are at the current time.  The company hopes to build this out over time into a comprehensive suite of trend insights.

Jin points out that they're only at the start of a long journey: "The Collected Critics project has still got a lot to do.  We have only just started indexing, and have already collected millions of data points and scraped hundreds of thousands of pages.  We're planning to build the site out horizontally over time - not just focussing on tech, but on other consumer products too.  Now that we've proven the technology, we're ready to take it to the next level.  We hope that this can be the go-to place for all consumer reviews in the medium term."

Collected Critics can be accessed at http://www.collectedcritics.com/ on computers or mobile phones.  Twitter users can follow Collected Critics at @collectcritics.