Evolution of customer review technology

In the internet era, the average consumer follows a predictable pattern when shopping online: search; land on a product page or marketplace; look at descriptions, cost and special offers; compare against competitors; and (perhaps most crucially) read or view customer reviews. Customer reviews are so important because they are a goldmine of data. They provide personal anecdotes about, and evaluations of, the exact products and services prospective buyers are evaluating. They provide information about attributes such as size, fit, taste and strength that may not be available in other marketing and sales material.

Before the internet, review data (and often even basic product and service data) was not easily accessible. For product and service insights, people mainly sought views from trusted personal acquaintances. That changed with advent of the internet, which ultimately made millions of reviews on hundreds of websites and marketplaces available to consumers in a matter of seconds.

But this didn't happen overnight.

In the late 1990s, review functionality was nascent and primarily associated with marketplaces. Some companies focused on review aggregation, and a few prominent players like Rateitall.com, Deja.com and Epinions began to dominate the space. This developing landscape witnessed a wave of mergers and acquisitions, most notably Google's acquisition of Deja.com, which offered online comparison-shopping services, search capabilities, online ratings, and internet discussion forums. Today, Google is considered a review powerhouse where businesses need to rate highly if they expect to gain consumer trust and drive business from search engine optimization and the Google platform.