The way new Pikis are chosen varies by case, but in general it’s one of four scenarios:

Popular Topic – If there’s an entirely new product or new generation of products, we’re likely to create a Piki about it. When there’s an exciting new product we want our users to be able to sort through the variables that matter to them and avoid getting caught up in the hype. A great example would be our e-books Piki. This technology was emerging when our site started and was one of the first Pikis ever made. It’s a great starting point for a consumer who wants to buy an e-book, but doesn’t know what they’re even capable of.

A Piki We Crave for Ourselves – Yes, we’re guilty. Sometimes, an idea comes up for a Piki because we want it! We need some decision-making help too. Liqueurs and cars came about in this fashion (and our CEO actually used the cars Piki to help him choose his latest vehicle).

Great Data – It’s not always about what we’re looking for, but what we’ve got. If a member of our content team comes across a good data source that would benefit our users, they’re probably going to grab it. Part of our mission is to bring the vast amount of product information available online into an easy interface that’s actually accessible to consumers. Typically the hardest part of developing a Piki is finding the information to go into it, so starting with solid data is a huge benefit for us.

Requested by Users – We love when users tell us what they’re looking for in our next batch of Pikis. We’re constantly creating, but it feels even better to know we’re working on something that our users want.

With that in mind, please take some time to let us know the Pikis you’d like to see happen! As we continue to increase our amount of content, we want to make it as relevant as possible for our users. Feel free to post a comment here with your top Piki ideas. One lucky user will win the Piki ball of the day!

It’s not just search engines catering results. On Facebook, if you start typing a name into the search box, results will appear before you finished your query, and, often times, they are eerily right. As the folks at The Keesh discovered, Facebook is loading a file called first_degree.php that automatically displays the friends you interact with most. The Keesh even developed a bookmarklet that exposes Facebook friend ranking.

Even Yahoo caters content to you.

While this is often times convenient, there are a few issues which Eli Pariser talks about in the embedded TED Talk below.

Pariser talks about how different folks see different results depending on their Internet habits. In the search bubble you may not be exposed to new thoughts or opinions. The results can stagnate. If your tastes change your searches may take a while to catch up. It’s an interesting concept, and a problem that you may not have known existed.

There’s a few ways to pop the filter bubble. Matt Cutts of Google responded to the Ted talk to let people know that by adding “&pws=0″ to the end of search URLs, you’ll remove any personal bias. You can read more about what Cutts has to say here. Additionally, you can avoid personal bias by browsing privately or using search engines like DuckDuckGo

At Pikimal we don’t assume much of anything. We only assume that you’re on our site because you want to find the best product according to criteria that you determine. We aren’t trying to protect you in some bubble or net, and we certainly haven’t hired a swami to help predict the results you want. That’s just incredulous.

It’s our mission to help improve search and I hope you learned a little something from this post. Feel free to share your thoughts or personal experience in the comments.

At Pikimal we talk a lot about the facts. We gather quantitative data from all over the web and make it accessible to our users through the Piki interface. We collect all of these facts in order to help people make a better decision without doing hours of research. So why do we include the option for users to rate and review the products as well? You guys really like it. And personal experience makes a great complement to data.

User reviews are the most trusted source of product performance information on the web. People like reading others’ experiences and opinions. It’s like asking around at work or checking with the better business bureau, but you don’t have to leave home! Unfortunately, just because it’s the most trusted source doesn’t mean that it should be. Most users never realize the level of falsity and marketing-bias going on behind user reviews. Many of these reviews are actually paid for by companies looking to improve their image and sell products. They sound so convincing because they’re written by real people trying to get real results for large corporations. The reviewer often had no interaction with the product, but gives it a raving review because that’s their job.

Why then, would Pikimal include this broken system as part of our site? We’re optimistic. Our users join Pikimal to became part of a search community, and we want them to have the ability to contribute and be heard. We screen diligently for any false reviews and remove them immediately. Our hope is that the combination of Pikimal’s facts with our users’ experience will give you a clear picture when it comes to any product. A best of both worlds approach so to speak. No system is perfect, but our site strives to be as accurate and reliable as possible in all aspects, including reviews.

For more information on false user reviews, please see our past blog posts:

The Problem with User Ratings

The Problem with User Ratings, Part 2: Astroturfing

Every one of us makes hundreds, if not thousands of decisions every day. Most decisions are so rooted in comfort that we may not bother to consider an alternative. Are we making the best decisions? Is there something better that we may not know about? In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, let’s take a look at our condoms Piki to answer these questions.

What makes you purchase the condom brand and type you usually go for? Do you switch it up often or always grab the tried-and-true? Often with simple purchases such as this, we have found a product that works for us and never look back. The risk of branching out and finding a product that doesn’t satisfy can keep us from trying something new, something better.

Pikimal can break that cycle by helping users find a product that can satisfy specific needs. Using condoms as our Valentines-themed example, a person can choose based on size, appearance, durability, male and female pleasure ratings, or any combination of the group.

Delving deeper, users can specify scented, flavored, and a variety of other criteria. What you may end up with might not be the brand you’ve been use to, but a suggestions that fits your personal criteria.

With such a wide selection of variables, a user might not even realize how versatile condoms can be. Using a Piki to help make a purchase decision actually exposes them to options they didn’t even know were available.

For the most part, we only see the Trojan brand advertised. Pikimal has no brand preferences and we make use of more than 1,100 facts from over sixty kinds of condoms. Users may be surprised to learn that Trojan brand condoms do not even fall in Pikimal’s top ten.

This Valentine’s day, why not visit the condom Piki and find a brand based on your criteria? By giving your decision-making process a second look, you might find a product that better fits your needs.

Retweet our post about this article (@pikimal) to be entered into our daily Piki ball giveaway! Open to U.S. residents only.

At Pikimal, we have a number of Pikis for you to explore, from juicers to video games, to ensure that you’re making the best purchasing decision. We want to help you cut through the smoke-and-mirror of marketing to find the item that you want, not what you’re told you should want. But, in addition to that, we have some orange bouncy balls. They’re inflatable, have our logo on them, and we want to give them to you. Why? Well, they’re taking over the office. And, who doesn’t want to spread a little cheer? For the foreseeable future, we’ll be giving away a ball Monday through Friday. We’ll call it The Great Pikimal Ball Experiment.

“But, Dan,” you’re wondering out loud. “What do I have to do to receive this piece of Pikimal history?” Thanks for asking! It’s simple. During the week, keep an eye on our Twitter, Facebook, and this blog to find out how to win. It may be as easy as leaving a comment, retweeting a post, or communicating with us on Facebook.

To kick things off, we’ll give away a ball to a random comments on this post. Not sure what to comment about? How about your favorite Piki? What you would like to see in future blog posts? What you would make a Piki about if you had the power?

via Gummy Bear Blog

Today’s blog post was written by a member of the Pikimal content team Alaina Cauchie. She is constantly creating and refining Pikis and is able to give an insightful look behind the scenes. At Pikimal, we strive to be transparent about the ways we help users to make informed decisions.

Liquor is one of those items where many feel slightly taken advantage of. It’s expensive compared to other alcohols, and we wonder sometimes how a $300 bottle can be worth it. As with many products, there is a ‘sweet spot’ where you get the most for your money. Items that are more expensive usually either have features only attractive to some or are relying on the cache of their brand name to instill worth in the product.

We do not test products at Pikimal – we gather data and condense it in order to create as accurate a picture as possible of an item’s quality. There are several well-known spirits competitions that we rely on to create a composite score; or a summary of how these liquors have been judged. Inevitably there will be blind spots in this type of quality assessment – it disadvantages those liquors that have been recently released, or are produced by companies that do not submit their products to competitions. How can we give these items a fair chance?

Easy – by relying on user reviews. Every liquor has at least three user ratings – usually asking about flavor, smoothness, and overall experience. In this way, great liquors can rise in our rankings through community appreciation rather than official competition status.

At Pikimal, we give you the power to determine what is important in your liquor selection. We typically offer several typical use cases (best vodka for a Martini; best tequila for a margarita; best rums for cooking) that highlight our combinations of facts. Do you want it cheap and good? We’ve already found the liquor for you. Want to set it on fire at your next party? Don’t worry; we’ve covered that as well (and we’ve just been inspired to create a fire extinguisher Piki).

The rest of the time, the top 10 list is based on you – what do you prioritize? What isn’t so important? What is required? Choose from different flavors, different countries, different proofs – be as picky as you want, this is YOUR list. Perhaps you decide that what you need is a high-proof, dessert flavored vodka. We won’t judge.

Do you need to be a gift for a new or expectant mother in your life, but all this baby stuff has you stumped? No prob, Bob. We’ve got everything you need to pick the the perfect present right here.

Baby Bottles
Bottle Warmers
Cribs
Baby Monitors
Strollers
Baby Swings
Car Seats
Cradles

77% of online shoppers use user reviews and ratings while making purchases online. This means that companies increasingly rely on positive online user reviews to make money.

Enter, astroturfing.

“Astroturfing” is a play on the idea of a grassroots movement. In this case, instead of people supporting a business from the grassroots through genuine online reviews and recommendations to friends, businesses are paying to have these positive reviews written for them, giving them the false appearance of having a grassroots fan base. As people increasingly turn to online user reviews to help them make decisions about everything from what to buy to where to vacation, companies have come to rely more and more on positive reviews for their business. This pressure has caused many companies to engage in astroturfing in order to keep up with the competition.

A recent exposé in the New York Times by David Streightfeld shows how astroturfing is being used on major websites like Amazon, Yelp!, and TripAdvisor. Streightfeld cites Craigslist posts in which users solicit positive reviews with posts like “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor,” and “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.” Streightfeld also interviewed freelance writers some of whom are making up to $10 per review writing reviews on sites like Amazon.

We even run into this problem with fake user reviews on Pikimal from time to time. For instance, take a look at this glowing review of one of the vodkas in our Vodkas Piki.

This vodka sounds pretty amazing, right? That is until you find out that this particular review was posted on the same day that we were contacted by a PR firm representing that brand of vodka and the review was posted using the same email address as the one the PR firm used to contact us. That sort of transparent astroturfing may seem brazen – or even downright sloppy – but this is hardly an isolated incident. Fishy user reviews like this one appear on our site all the time. Some are easy to catch, some are a little more tricky, and undoubtedly some manage to escape detection.

The problem that we, and so many other websites face, is what to do about astroturfing. Some companies use human review to try to get rid of fake reviews. Unfortunately, this system can only realistically eliminate the most obvious offenders, and on sites like Amazon with millions of of user reviews, having a person review each one is impractical. Computer algorithms are sometimes used to do some of the sorting work, but even these are not absolute answers.

For consumers, a better answer might be to refer only to reviews and recommendations from friends and people you know. The website Stamped.com is a great example of a way to do this. Stamped allows users to share their favorite books, restaurants, music, movies and more directly with the people in their social networks. By dealing only with the recommendations of people you know, you can at least be somewhat more certain that the recommendations you are getting are genuine. Unfortunately, you don’t always agree with your friends, and if you are trying to make a decision about something that none of them have tried before, you are left flying blind.

So what other options do consumers have?

I started Pikimal to help address some of the issues that cause people to turn to user reviews to make decisions in the first place. As we’ve seen in Part 1 and Part 2 of this discussion on user reviews, the system of user ratings utilized by most major websites is extremely flawed – maybe even irreparably so. But why do people turn to user reviews in the first place?

I think for most of us, user reviews are a way of having more confidence in our purchases. Especially when we are buying something with which we may not have much experience, looking to the experiences and knowledge of others seems like a much better option than making a decision based on marketing or random choice. The problem is that by relying on user reviews, consumers can get the feeling that they are making better decisions without having actually made a better decision at all.

But what else can people do? For someone to actually make a truly good decision they would need to be able to have all of the relevant information and would need to be able to process it in a way that made certain that they were making the best choice for their unique needs and circumstances. No one has the time or the capacity to become an expert on every product that they purchase, so user reviews seem like the best alternative.

The really cool thing about Pikimal, however, is that we’ve built a tool – the Piki – that takes all the facts about a set of products and uses an individually customizable algorithm to allow consumers to find the right products for them. There’s no need to be an expert on something to know that you are making the best decision. You just tell the Piki what is important to you, and using the facts available for each product, the Piki tells you which is the best for you. Users can include reviews and ratings in their decision if they like, or if they’d rather just go with the facts, they have the option of eliminating them altogether.

Pretty cool, huh? We think so.

Christmas shopping for the men in your life can be tricky.  That’s why we thought we’d put together a list of gift ideas for all the different men in your life.  If you need a little extra help shopping, just follow the links to the Pikis.  There you’ll find a top ten list based on the facts about each product to help you take the guess work out of your holiday shopping.

Best Gifts for Geeky Guys

Computer Monitors
Ebook Readers
Electronic Translators
Satellite Radio Receivers
Tablet Computers

Best Gifts for Sporty Guys

Baseball Cleats
Baseball Gloves
Baseball Equipment Bags
Climbing Harnesses
Ski Boots
Ski Goggles

Best Gifts for Outdoorsy Guys

Binoculars
Compasses
Crossbows
Hydration Backpacks
Kayaks
Rifles and Shotguns
Spotting Scopes
Telescopes
Tents
Night Vision Devices
Rooftop Cargo Carriers

Best Gifts for Foodie Guys

Blenders
Bread Machine
Coffee Grinder
Deep Fryer
Food Processors
Meat Slicers and Grinders
Waffle Makers

Best Gifts for Hipster Guys

Bike Computers
Bike Lights
Camcorders
Camera Lenses
DSLR Cameras
Turntables
Typewriters

Best Gifts for Handy Guys

Chainsaws
Electric Drills
Lawnmowers
Portable Air Compressors
Pressure Washers
Snow Blowers

Best Gifts for The Man Cave 

Beer
Blu-Ray Players
DVD Players
Kegerators
Televisions
Whiskey

From Facebook to billboards to bathroom stalls, advertisements are everywhere. It’s no secret that we are being marketed to almost constantly from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep. In fact, Media Matters estimated in 2007 that the average American is exposed to around 600 ads each day. If we assume that a person is awake for around 14 hours a day, that means that we are exposed to a new ad every 1.4 minutes.

Those are crazy numbers and they bring to mind some pretty interesting questions. For one, how can advertising possibly work when we are exposed to so many ads everyday? Most of us have trouble remembering to pick up the dry cleaning, so how can we possibly remember 600 ads? Even if we could remember some of those ads, shouldn’t we be immune to advertising by now? Every ad we see claims that this new toothpaste/car/movie/lawyer/toy is the best one available. We know that they can’t all be right, so it is easy to draw the conclusion that advertisements are not the best source of information when we are trying to decide which product to buy. So why do companies spend so much money saturating our world with advertisements?

The answer might surprise you. It turns out that advertisements may not even need to convince us that a particular product is the best for us to buy it. It just needs to make us remember the name.

One of my favorite examples of how this works comes from an article by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer published in the Psycological Review called Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic. In this article, Goldstein and Gigerenzer site a study in which a group of Americans and a group of Germans were each asked to answer the question, “Which city has a larger population: San Diego or San Antonio?” Two-thirds of the Americans correctly answered that San Diego had the bigger population. Surprisingly, 100% of the Germans also answered correctly. How could it be that the Americans – who presumably had more knowledge of American cities – had less success answering this question than the Germans who knew considerably less?

Goldstein and Gigerenzer postulated that is was actually their lack of information that gave the Germans their advantage. When they asked the German group if they had ever heard of the two cities before being asked the question, 100% of them said that they had heard of San Diego whereas only half of them had ever heard of San Antonio. Because San Diego was more familiar to them, they assumed that it had a larger population than San Antonio which was less familiar or unfamilar to them. In this case, their lack of knowledge made it easier for them to guess the right answer than it was for their American counterparts.

A similar process often occurs when we go to buy things online. Barring previous experience, brands that are familiar to us tend to seem more reliable to us than brands that don’t. Think about it: would you rather buy a Canon camcorder or an Aiptek camcorder? Is your preference based on knowledge of the brands or does one (presumably the Cannon) just seem better to you because it is more familiar? For most of us it is hard to escape the feeling that familiar brands are better than unfamiliar brands and that is the insidious way in which advertising can unknowingly sway even the most savvy consumer.

Don’t think you can be fooled? Test yourself – Pikimal produces factual results for digital cameras, cars, or heaters. Take a look at the results: which do you trust, the facts or the familiar?