Product recommendation sites have evolved beyond good product/bad product reviews.   The new breed actually looks at search behavior and serves up products based on specific customer needs.

Take Wize.com for example.  It gathers and analyzes product reviews from hundreds of sites, including  Amazon, BestBuy, CNET, Target, and Walmart.  Wize recently rolled out some new features and an upgraded search algorithm.  The gist being, customers don’t have to sift through countless product reviews to find “the best dishwasher for energy efficiency” or “the worst camera for night shots”.  Wize finds these results for them.

While this is an impressive feat from a semantic search perspective, we think marketers could use a site like Wize.com to their advantage.   For example, what features are being highlighted about your product?  Who are your competitors by feature?  Not to mention, the obvious – are the reviews favorable?

Wize is geared towards consumer goods, so we wouldn’t recommend it for a service industry or general brand monitoring.   The idea here is to learn how customers are searching for/finding your products – and more importantly, what is leading to a sale.