About review consensi

A part of our job is to turn many conflicting opinions into one source of useful information.
Also, yes, the plural of "consensus" is "consensi".

What is a review consensus?

ReviewFinder - as the name suggests - finds reviews from from the most respected and well-researched blogs on the internet and puts them on one page.

  • We read the reviews and extract the common opinions that they share(we call them "review points" - for example "Easy to Use", or "Works with Alexa").
  • If many reviews mention the same review point, it is more likely to be true.
  • We consolidate review points into a single list of pros and cons.

In the example on the left, you can see that 59% of experts agree that the speaker charges slowly, but only 12% of experts agree that it's too expensive.

Why do we do this?
We want to save our users the headache of reading 20000+ words of mostly-identical product reviews, and filter out the ads and fake reviews to extract the most useful information.

How we create a review consensus

The overall process:

  1. First, we look for the best product reviewers on the internet - people who really test the items and are experts and enthusiasts in their field. We link these reviews to the corresponding product on ReviewFinder.
  2. Then our team will read all of the linked articles about a specific item. This often amounting to tens of thousands of words.
  3. We write up the key review points that each reviewer has t say about a certain product.
  4. If the points are similar/synonymous (one expert says "Deep Bass", other expert says "Great Bass Sound") we merge these points, since they amount to the same meaning (i.e. if you’re a bass lover, these headphones are great!)
  5. Once we have processed the main pros and cons for every review, we write down the summary based on the most common points of agreement. (“The bass is great, but the size and weight makes it uncomfortable to carry”).

Important to note:

  • When aggregating data, information loss is inevitable
    To avoid a long list of very similar adjectives, we have chosen to represent the same ideas in a review by a common phrase. If you are particularly interested in a specific review point, we encourage you to click on that review point and read the individual opinions of experts.
    • Example: If one reviewer says that this speaker is “Waterproof” and another says that “it can be used in the pool”, these mean the same thing in terms of functionality. So they will be merged when our team is aggregating review points.
  • Defining "review points" is subjective.
    We try our best to represent expert's every opinion as a separate review point. However, this is subjective.
    • Example: Different people on our team will disagree whether "rich and powerful sound" is one review point (Good Sound Quality) or 2 review points ("Loud Sound" and "Good Sound Quality"). However, if the product is particularly good at one thing (pro) or particularly bad at another (con), the experts do tend to all agree, and the consensus will reflect that.
  • Opinions can contradict each other
    Many aspects of the product are subjective to the expert’s feelings, the context in which they are using it, what other products they have reviewed recently, and so on and so forth. Therefore opinions can be very different, even to the point of contradicting each other. If there are contradicting opinions in the review points, we will simply indicate the fact of contradiction by adding points to both the pros and cons side of the consensus. It is not our job to reconcile experts’ opinions; we just collect them and let you be the judge. If the feature is important to you, we recommend reading the linked articles to get the full picture.
    • Example: Some experts say that a certain vacuum cleaner is good with carpets; others will say that it's bad with carpets. Maybe these experts tested the item out on different kinds of carpeting; maybe a reviewer just really likes this brand and therefore was more lenient in their review. We would add “good with carpets” to pros, and “bad with carpets” to cons.
  • Facts will not be contradictory.
    Contradictions do not apply to factual statements. We will fact check the feature with the manufacturer, and remove the incorrect statement from our consensus. This is uncommon, as it only happens when a product expert makes a mistake - but it does happen from time to time.
    • Example: If one review says "iit works with Alexa" and another review says "it doesn't work with Alexa", one of these reviewers is wrong and their point would be removed.

Read the reviews!

Above all else, we encourage you to read the reviews that we have collected. The goal of the review consensus is to act as a starting point in your research, so that you can read the detailed reviews that talk about the features that you care about the most and make an informed purchasing decision.