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TechSpot's Product Finder: Our Latest Project

By

On September 26, 2011, 12:52 AM Breaking News

For about a year we've been working behind the scenes on our latest project, the TechSpot Product Finder, a comprehensive up-to-date catalog of tech products. We hope this becomes your next destination to make well-informed decisions when you go out shopping for your next laptop, SSD, monitor, digital camera, HTPC, tablet, or even your next media player.

Think of it as a Metacritic for computer enthusiasts, the Product Finder is divided in five main sections: Computer Hardware, Systems (PCs, Laptops, Tablets), Smartphones, Electronics, and PC Games.


Cameras

Desktop PCs

Keyboards

Laptops

Motherboards

PC Games

Monitors

Printers

Smartphones

Storage

Tablets

Cases

Speakers

Power Supplies

Home Audio & Video

Processors

Routers

TVs

Mice

And More!

We are opening the new section in beta form today, so you can take advantage of it right away. We have yet to write a FAQ explaining some of the internal processing and criteria we use, but for now two things to keep in mind:

1) We give products an average score based on all the reviews we can find for them across the web.

2) We apply a special algorithm to show you the hottest and freshest possible products in each category, so whenever you are looking for "the best camera" to buy, we can come up with answers right away by browsing the first page or two for that product category (*hint: also check out the data filters to narrow down your searches).

As with all beta launches, you may find some stuff is broken. We'll appreciate your help sending us feedback. Our intent is to keep improving the section in the coming weeks and integrate Product Finder data to all the things we do on TechSpot. Thanks again for your support and we hope you enjoy the new section --- see feature highlight screenshots after the jump.



Product Finder available from our main menu on top.

 


Featured products in each category showing color-coded metascores.

 


Metascores with our 4-tier breakdown: Excellent, Good, Average and Bad.

 


Popular products carry handwritten descriptions and all have multiple angle shots.

 


Pros and cons give you a quick glimpse of what editors liked and disliked about each product.

 


Comparison shopping is available on the side for your convenience.

 

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User Comments: 53

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  1. This is awesome!

  2. Nice! A bit like testfreaks.com I guess, but I like it!

    Already checking out my future motherboard

    Keep the good work up, guys!

  3. Very cool. Are you guys planning on adding a section where TechSpot members who are owners of a given product can give their feedback too? I think that would be very useful.

  4. Staff

    @gwailo247, that's certainly on the plans but we'll take it one step at a time

  5. Great idea. I could use a product rating aggregate service. Hope it gets to be fairly extensive and fairly fair.

  6. gwailo247 said:

    Very cool. Are you guys planning on adding a section where TechSpot members who are owners of a given product can give their feedback too? I think that would be very useful.

    Would be nice to have proof of purchase, but that would be a lot of man power.

  7. this is sweet.. just took a look... cant believe how good it is, and why has no one done this before?

  8. i love the new feature of the website your website is more organize than others and simple keep up the good works and best wishes

  9. Great addition to the Techspot!

  10. spydercanopus said:

    gwailo247 said:

    Very cool. Are you guys planning on adding a section where TechSpot members who are owners of a given product can give their feedback too? I think that would be very useful.

    Would be nice to have proof of purchase, but that would be a lot of man power.

    I guess what techspot could do it review the user review of the product and make sure that they go into enouh detail that proves they have had at least hands on contact with it?

    I think Proof of purchase would be going a bit far and to be fair, I don't have proof of purchase on a few of my products because i've either won them or been given them!

  11. It is a (very) good start.

    I believe your filters should have more characteristics. For example. I looked at storage, then at SSD's, but you didn't have a filter for size. As I am looking for around 120 GB, I had to go through a number of pages to find all of them, and some of the titles didn't have the size, so I had to open them to find out what the size was.

    Being able to select a number of products for side to side comparisons would be helpful as well.

    All of this takes time, so as I say, it is a good start.

  12. Great idea - and well needed for Techspot.

  13. burty117 said:

    spydercanopus said:

    gwailo247 said:

    Very cool. Are you guys planning on adding a section where TechSpot members who are owners of a given product can give their feedback too? I think that would be very useful.

    Would be nice to have proof of purchase, but that would be a lot of man power.

    I guess what techspot could do it review the user review of the product and make sure that they go into enouh detail that proves they have had at least hands on contact with it?

    I think Proof of purchase would be going a bit far and to be fair, I don't have proof of purchase on a few of my products because i've either won them or been given them!

    Or at the very least, make sure that only registered users of TechSpot can leave reviews.

    But in regards to the article, I think that this is awesome! Good work, guys, and keep it up!

  14. Great idea, i've used your buying guides in a a couple builds for people, and a good source for other products is a resource I'll use a lot. You guys rock!

  15. I took a quick look at it, very nice work. However the first thing I want to do is sort by price from low to high, that way I can find the medium for quality product to low price. There is no sort by price from low to high Just from price X to Y.

  16. I hope you implement some kind of score degradation system. Scores should gradually decrease over time as they compare to current technology (or, a secondary, relavancy score could be added). Many (for example) phones are still available on the market that got good reviews a year ago, but realistically they don't deserve the same score today.

    Otherwise, everything looks great and I will definitely make use of this new feature. Thanks =D

  17. Also, you have the ThermalTake Chaser MK-I listed, but the product links within go to some keyboard.

  18. Awesome, now we only need to keep away fake reviews

  19. wagan8r said:

    Or at the very least, make sure that only registered users of TechSpot can leave reviews.

    But in regards to the article, I think that this is awesome! Good work, guys, and keep it up!

    Perhaps a minimum post count should be required before someone can post a review?

  20. I hope I'm not crashing your party, but popularity ranking is stupid and drives the crowd toward Intel products in a pure Apple style.There should be an option for processor type both in motherboards and laptops section.There should be categories of laptops such as netbooks, ultrabooks, student type, gaming laptops and so on, options valid through other categories.One can not buy hardware just for the bragging rights, SO NOT SO GOOD IN IMPLEMENTATION AS IT WAS IN INTENTION.

  21. congratulations! A very good initiative.I particularly like the features regarding the pros & cons,and also the reviews which are categorised by 'good', 'excellent', 'bad' , that way one will know about the positives as well as negatives which people encountered during their extensive usage.I haven't seen such concept anywhere else. :p

  22. Excellent! Great work guys. This will definitely come in handy.

  23. The Product Finder seems like a nice addition to Techspot but what happened to the Deals page? The one that could be sorted by date and hotness of the deal.

  24. I didn't mean to make a mountain of out a molehill, I just figured that some of the members who build or service computers could probably add a lot of real world information that a tech writer may not have access to in the same way, say advising us that a given video card is very hard to clean, or a given CPU cooler tends to start making a noise after six months.

    Obviously having Guest write "Nvidia sucks, buy AMD" on every Nvidia card article would be pointless, but I think that this site's members would be a valuable resource to be tapped. The forums are filled with lots of people who give great hardware advice in terms of purchase and service, and it would be good IMO to channel that knowledge into product reviews, where they would be more accessible than forum searching.

  25. Very well done, but i'll stick to traditional methods and newegg customer reviews.

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