So the decade plus old dryer in our basement that had been making funny noises for the last year finally broke. With 6 people in our household (3 kids and 1 Au Pair) we need an immediate replacement. No big deal, I thought - I will just do a bit of online research. Well two hours later I am none the wiser. I have settled on a model but with an awfully low degree of confidence. I started by going to consumerreports.com. Even though they had a fairly recently updated set of ratings several of the rated models were no longer available. On some of the models there were stark differences between the official research results and the reviews provided by consumers. Then I started to look at various e-commerce sites. Model ratings were very spread out - a few here, a few there - and usually about 4 clicks into the site making it very tedious to compare. There is a lot of data out there but no information. What could be done? Somebody needs to aggregate formal reviews and blog sentiment in an intelligent manner. In particular what is needed are higher level views of particular brands. For instance how is GE versus LG for dryers? How has that changed over time? Hopefully someone will crack that nut before our washer breaks.

So the decade plus old dryer in our basement that had been making funny noises for the last year finally broke. With 6 people in our household (3 kids and 1 Au Pair) we need an immediate replacement. No big deal, I thought - I will just do a bit of online research. Well two hours later I am none the wiser. I have settled on a model but with an awfully low degree of confidence. I started by going to consumerreports.com. Even though they had a fairly recently updated set of ratings several of the rated models were no longer available. On some of the models there were stark differences between the official research results and the reviews provided by consumers. Then I started to look at various e-commerce sites. Model ratings were very spread out - a few here, a few there - and usually about 4 clicks into the site making it very tedious to compare. There is a lot of data out there but no information. What could be done? Somebody needs to aggregate formal reviews and blog sentiment in an intelligent manner. In particular what is needed are higher level views of particular brands. For instance how is GE versus LG for dryers? How has that changed over time? Hopefully someone will crack that nut before our washer breaks.