About Looria
Why researching products is a pain
Our user surveys and interviews have revealed the top frustrations with the current process:
1. Fake Reviews and Sponsored Content
The current online review landscape is full of fake reviews, which makes it difficult to trust the information we find. Because reviews are so important, some companies try to manipulate them by writing fake reviews themselves or incentivizing customers or professional reviewers to give positive feedback. Many sites that advertise that they do product testing and comparisons actually don't and are sponsored.
2. SEO Spam
SEO spam is an unethical marketing tactic designed to game the search engine algorithms to achieve a higher ranking in the search results. Thousands of "top five (X product)" articles have copypasted top-rated products from Amazon instead of doing any research and testing.
3. Ads
Serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines. The founders of Google pointed this out themselves when they were just getting started. Searches display advertisements instead of information. Ads are now cluttering search results, and sometimes they are misleading or irrelevant.
4. Scattered and Inconsistent Information
People cross-check multiple sources (4-7 websites on average) when researching products. The information can be scattered, hard to find, and hard to sort through.
Looria makes researching products easy
Q: Why should I trust this meta-review site over the 100's of other meta or search sites and 10,000s of fake review sites on the web?
A: We are completely unbiased and transparent We are not affiliated with any of the businesses or products we review, so we have no incentive to skew our ratings. Our team deeply understands the product review space and the specific problems that exist within that market. We're also solving our own problem after spending countless hours finding and researching good products. We will never accept incentives to adjust our rankings.
Q: Why shouldn't I just exclusive use Wirecutter or Consumer Reports?
A: You're more than welcome to. But we find that most people don't trust a single source and look at multiple opinions (4-7 websites on average). One single source will never provide "just enough" research for a product you plan to spend a lot of money on and use for a long time. There is often at least one deal-breaking issue that you will find after reading through different sources.
Q: How do you avoid fake reviews? How do you avoid the garbage in - garbage out problem?
A: Many people add "Reddit" to their search queries to find authentic product reviews and that's why Reddit is one of our main sources.
No platform is resistant to fake reviews and spam, but we think it's happening less frequently on Reddit for various reasons:
- Redditors and other forum members are more interested in boosting their ego by showing their depth of knowledge on the topic (and correcting others on the topic), whereas corporate websites are more interested in raking profit by displaying (potentially) dishonest information.
- Enthusiasts in subreddits are pretty good at spotting dishonest or fake content, which results in immediate downvotes. The whole karma system helps with trustworthiness.
- Most subs are moderated well and spam gets removed quite quickly
In addition, we focus on keeping track of and removing the special status of sources caught getting paid to write fake reviews. Some categories are more prone to astroturfing than others, and we account for that by restricting the sources. Actively curating the sources is part of our daily work.
Q: How do you select your sources?
A: Our trusted sources and ranking calculations are fully transparent. You can learn more and contribute here
Q: How do you deal with product model or component changes?
A: Products and their quality change over time, and some old products are much better than new ones. We're working on tracking different product revisions and their sentiment over time, so you can get a complete picture of when a product has improved or gone from good to bad. Data about products that still work well but can't be bought anymore can still give valuable information about the quality of a brand over time.
The team behind Looria
Looria is a team of curious engineering and business minds committed to radically improving how people make purchase decisions. The founding team deeply understands the product review space and started working on Looria out of personal frustrations with the current product research experience.
Let us know what you think! Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
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