Retrevo - Customer Search

PRWEB, Las Vegas, January 9, 2007- Retrevo showed off their new search engine today at the Consumer Electronics Show. The engine is the first of its kind, and is going to be dedicated to pre-purchase research for buyers. Retrevo users will be able to use information gathered from the engine to make more informed purchases and to obtain technical support after the sale. This will give the consumer a very wide spectrum of information through a single portal. There will be twelve categories of products offered according to the news release.

Vipin Jain, founder and CEO of Retrevo said:”With so many new products touting an almost infinite array of features and functions, consumers need a single source of authoritative information to help them buy, use and fix their electronics.”

The new search engine will also help consumers obtain sometimes difficult owner documentation and other information that might not be available outside this source. I don’t know about you, but this is something I could have made use of at times in the past. We shall see just how effective the new engine is at ferreting out hard to find technical support.

Retrevo is a single source for all consumer electronics information, from the latest buzz and deals to hard-to-find product documentation. Retrevo uses proprietary algorithms to crawl, collect, analyze and classify all known information for consumer electronics products. As electronic products become more complex and interconnected to other devices, Retrevo’s machine learning technology performs deep content analysis, classification and retrieval, so consumers get the right answers right away.
 

Does it?

There is actually a Gamma version of the search engine up already, so I performed a quick test to see how the engine performed. The page is really functional, as there are tabs in the left border to navigate between manufacturers and various other information venues like forums, blogs, and reviews. There are several advanced features, most notably a Firefox plugin that allows users to add Retrevo to that browser.

The page is divided into two windows, the one on the left providing a standard hit list of the top 10 search results for the query. The right pane shows a review of the highlighted page, so that you do not have to navigate away from Retrevo. I really like this, even if it does crowd the page just a little bit. The text is still easy to read and the clarity on this page is really good.

I tried to trick the little devil and entered a brand new product straight out of the Consumer Electronics Show. There were a few hits, but none to the actual manufacturer’s site. I decided to play fair and entered x-box 360, which supplied a wealth of information about the console. Obviously, the manufacturer site was the top hit for information, but the left tabs provided all sorts of information from other sources.

This is a worthy little tool, even though any experienced searcher would find the information easily, it would still be more cumbersome than this one source site. This is a useful and clean product for anyone who has a… computer! I am glad to see another success so early in the year, and I hope the company keeps the site up to date and free of clutter. There was no mention of human scrutiny or plain language search capability, and I would hate to see useful results turned into ads. The engine resembles Google in many ways, and obviously utilizes some of the same techniques for data gathering.