

Ask HN: Would you use a review sentiment search engine? - dopplesoldner

Hi guys, wanted to get some opinion about an idea I&#x27;ve had. Constructive and honest feedback will be really appreciated.<p>A sentiment search engine. Suppose you type the name of a restaurant&#x2F;camera&#x2F;hotels&#x2F;protein supplement etc. - you will get a condensed graphical view of with &quot;sentiment scores&quot; in different categories based on what real customers have been saying around the internet. E.g for an iphone, entities might be battery, display etc.<p>Data is scraped from individual reviews, shopping sites etc. Additionally you get information about the original source of information so you can carry further research if you want to.<p>So in short, it can be the default go to place for any kind of reviews.
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neuralk
This is a great idea. I would use it. In fact, I want to build it! I've been
reading about sentiment analysis as part of my research, and I had this idea
literally the other day: I was looking for laptop batteries and I did not have
the patience to search through some N number of Amazon/eBay/other storefronts.
The second issue was the fact reviews range from 1 star to 5 star on the same
product BUT a crucial fact was that more recent reviews are more relevant (for
instance, if everyone from the past 3 months is rating it 1 star, vs. only 5
star where all previous bad reviews were from 3+ years ago).

So how would you define sentiment? A single score on a range from "good" to
"bad"? Multidimensional, like a range of emotions? A major problem I've found
in sentiment analysis literature that some assumptions/models yield
limited/poor results even if algorithms are good.

Have you started working on this? I'd be happy to discuss it or your ideas
some more.

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dopplesoldner
Thanks for your feedback. I have been working on/off on this with a friend -
the current algorithms are pretty rudimentary. Would be happy to create a
email thread if you are interested in hearing more.

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ohashi
This sounds very similar to what I do for web hosting reviews. For instance,
take a look at Digital Ocean's reviews:
[http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean/](http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean/)

It calculates an overall (based on all pos/neg things said) but breaks down
into components relevant to web hosting: support, uptime, price. You can also
figure out who competitors are and see trends.

If you can't tell, I like the idea. I also think it's an incredibly hard
problem to solve. I've done it for a small niche. Scaling it to a general
solution is something I haven't been able to figure out (yet).

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nateday
I agree with @manmeet that the algorithm for the sentiment analysis has to be
great; the search algorithm also has to be tremendous to convince me to switch
from Google or DuckDuckGo. To avoid the challenge of making a new search
engine, maybe you could build a plugin?

Somewhat similar sentiment analysis, for terms rather than unique entities:
[http://www.whatdoestheinternetthink.net](http://www.whatdoestheinternetthink.net)

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dopplesoldner
Hi nateday, thanks for your comments. The idea here is not to build a new
search engine per se. Suppose you are looking for reviews, what you normally
do is go to google and type "something reviews".

Instead we want you to go to our page, search for the entity and then get a
condensed view using reviews on the web for your search query.

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manmeet
I think its a pretty good idea. All depends on how well u design your
algorithm. I had a similar idea but wanted to use twitter to get sentiment
regarding anything, from people to movies to devices or services.

