Back in 1999 the site Pricerunner was launched as a powerful one stop shop for finding the best online stores for spending your well earned pay cheque… Well, it turns out the founders haven’t just spent the last decade sat back enjoying the hit counter soaring on their site, but they’ve been developing the next generation.
TestFreaks is this latest project of the founder ‘Kristofer Arwin’ and his band of designers and coders. Short description is that the site is another online review platform, where reviews are pulled in from hundreds of other review sites into one place, linked to the corresponding product and organised into the good, bad and ugly points…
Well, i’m sure that around about now your thinking ‘well, the Internet has about 50, 000 of these already, im sure I was on one this morning’. Surprisingly you could be kinda wrong, for a start many of the current review sites have articles reviewed by in-house staff, which is good and all, but kinda limits the amount of reviews on the site. TestFreaks has incorporated the massive online population of other review sites, including expert sites and average joe reviewers, pulling in the user reviews from all these other online comparison sites into one place. This makes it a fantastic place for the casual browsers to avoid the mess crawling through website’s like Reevoo and Ciao every time there looking for a new product. The designers also found time to incorporates the price checking features of the PriceRunner endeavour giving the visitors valuable details on the best online price for the item your looking at.
One of the most powerful features of this new site is a unique and powerful scoring system which rates every single product on the site, aptly named the ‘FreakScore‘. Another opportunity appears to point out the true size of the TestFreaks project, in that this international endeavour is not limited to the UK review sites, but pulls in critics from over 50 different continental markets. covering 13 languages (don’t worry, you can filter it down to English still). This means that reviews and scores are calculated not only on what the ‘Joe public’ thinking down your local pub, but also takes into account the opinions from around the world, creating a truly unique review of a product.
I suppose its a good idea to also point out that your not totally dependant on the general, random, inconsistent thoughts of raving loon’s who sit at home and review their new Camera or Computer Game, a series of ‘Expert Reviews’ are available for pretty much every product on the site and subcategory analysis of the items individual assets. So, as you can see from the listed item below ‘The Legend of Zelda Zelda‘ we have a FreakScore of 9.9, 33 Expert Reviews from ‘somewhat’ reliable online sources, and 30 reviews put forward from users who just found themselves sat at home with 10 minutes free to go online and give you there thoughts ;)… The individual assets I mentioned are shown towards the far right, games obviously being broken down into Gameplay, Graphics and Sound for this title!
MY OPINION…
Okay, so i’m guessing you get the general idea of what the site it by now… Reviews about every product that’s rolled off a production line since the dawn of time (pretty much)… Well, to be perfectly honest, I actually like the site, though I have my reservations about the nasty green background that’s on every page, kinda made me feel sea sick after a while lol. The shear number of review sites out there at the moment which just contain the same general rubbish, and pop up every time you type something into Google can really start to get annoying, and there is a good chance this site is about to become one of them, BUT at least the content is a better mix of the things you were probably looking for when you typed in ‘Canon SLR Camera’ and your gonna get the information you wanted, not an pitch for a random product or your very own equine porn web banner…
The site boasts some very powerful features, one above all others which I liked, the ability to ‘ask the community’ which kinda acts like a mini-forum for the Individual product your looking at. On every review page there are a list of the reviews already written from the experts and users, but along side this is a simple box where you can ask something, and hope for a reply. The result of this was somewhat impressive when I asked about the features of a new Canon SLR I just purchased, which was to my surprise given I was expecting the usual crowd of Internet chav’s who respond to any question with ‘Your Mum’ jokes, or something just as profound ! Alas this feature requires you to have an account with TestFreaks, which is kinda annoying, personally id of thought a ‘put your email address here for response’ option would of suited better to a ‘pop in – look around – pop back out’ style site like this, its not exactly the place id spend hours of time and want an account…
At current the biggest problem I found while running around the site was the seriously high number of reviews which scored 9.9, 9.8, 9.7 etc, pretty much everything on the site scores either top marks or no marks. Which means that one of the biggest features of the site, the FreakScores are useless as a means of quickly judging the best item in a long list, and leaves you to slowly sift through them looking at the remarks of the reviewers, which you can probably do on Google, but its nice to have them all in one place. This bug is one i’m putting down to the site BETA status though and can imagine its something that is likely to be updated before the formal release.
Another problem that needs to be mentioned is the somewhat slow speed of the site, when so many other online locations are available to users wanting quick opinions of products, its easy to imagine getting a little frustrated with the 2-3 second load times of pages on TestFreaks, but again this is probably attributed to the BETA, and in fact E-Consultancy published a Q&A session with the founder of TestFreaks whereby a promise of faster speeds were expected within the autumn !
One final point of interest, which came to my attention during the browsing of this site is the lack of ability to add a review of product directly to this site. At current the only reviews which are linked to products are those which have been found by the TestFreak web-crawling bot… Its not so much of a serious problem with the site, but more of a ‘would be nice’ feature lol, and iv even been informed that its something that they are thinking of implementing at a later date…
In conclusion, this one is defiantly a ‘must have’ site that’s in your bookmarks, favourites, or whatever magic way you keep your favourite websites organised… Keep an eye on this one people, its a useful one !!!
ThinkGeek just released this little gem of a device…the Phantom Keystroker V2. Smaller, easier to use, only $14.99.
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