Improving product review search experiences on general search engines

In the Web 2.0 era, internet users contribute a large amount of online content. Product review is a good example. Since these phenomena are distributed all over shopping sites, weblogs, forums etc., most people have to rely on general search engines to discover and digest others' comments. While conventional search engines work well in many situations, it's not sufficient for users to gather such information. The reasons include but are not limited to: 1) the ranking strategy does not incorporate product reviews' inherent characteristics, e.g., sentiment orientation; 2) the snippets are neither indicative nor descriptive of user opinions. In this paper, we propose a feasible solution to enhance the experience of product review search. Based on this approach, a system named "Improved Product Review Search (IPRS)" is implemented on the ground of a general search engine. Given a query on a product, our system is capable of: 1) automatically identifying user opinion segments in a whole article; 2) ranking opinions by incorporating both the sentiment orientation and the topics expressed in reviews; 3) generating readable review snippets to indicate user sentiment orientations; 4) easily comparing products based on a visualization of opinions. Both results of a usability study and an automatic evaluation show that our system is able to assist users quickly understand the product reviews within limited time.