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It would be nice if a Consumer Review Site could, y'know, ACTUALLY DISPLAY PEOPLE'S REVIEWS.May 29 '08 (Updated Sep 24 '08) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Epinions has been sucking it to the nth degree lately. It'll make a long-time reviewer want to throw in the towel.
Author's Note: All of the problems below have been fixed since I first reported them. The commentary below has been kept around for the sake of posterity, to illustrate how cumbersome the Epinions search engine has been to deal with over the past few years, and the excruciatingly slow response time with which Epinions resolves serious problems like these. Alright. Time to get a long-dormant rant out of my system. I'd like to think that I've been pretty patient about waiting for the various technical gremlins that have haunted the Epinions site to resolve themselves, and I've tried to be handy about submitting bug reports whenever I see something wonky, but it's getting to the point where enough is enough. Seriously. I've been an avid participant on this site for close to 8 years (my output has decreased more recently, but I still try to crank out an in-depth music review at least once a week), and I've seen it go through many ups and downs in terms of the site's technical capabilities, but nothing thus far has outraged me more than Epinions' current ineptitude when it comes to actually enabling people to find the reviews that I've spent so much of my spare time writing. Let's make a few things abundantly clear: 1) I do not expect Epinions to make my writing extremely popular. 2) I do not expect Epinions to direct more traffic to my reviews than the small handful of people who might be specifically looking for a review of something that I've written about. 3) I do not expect to make a whole lot of money writing for Epinions. (Really, it's generated more loose change over the years than I'd have expected. I can't complain about that.) Hey, I'm a niche writer. I've accepted that fact and I'm actually kind of proud of it. Every now and then I might write about one of the Evanescence/Linkin Park/Coldplay/Radiohead types and rack up thousands of non-member hits over time, which is awesome, but that's because the product is popular, not because my writing is widely revered or anything. Most of the time, I do a write-up on some little known Christian and/or indie-type artist whose name is met with a stunned response of "Who?" upon mentioning it to most fans of Top 40 or Christian radio, and less than 50 people will ever read the thing. That's cool. If I managed to spread the word to even a few new folks, then I consider that a mission accomplished. I write to be informative - maybe even entertaining on a good day. I don't write to be popular, and I don't consider it to be Epinions' job to direct any extra hits my way. I see it as a nice little bonus when the occasional (and often seemingly random) review does manage to rack up some significant amount of outside readership. (In many cases, I actually wonder if it was a Google fluke or something - like a totally unrelated keyword brought up one of my reviews, somebody clicked it, and said, "Hey wait, I was looking for porn, what's with this Christian music crap?", and promptly hit the back button.) But there's an expectation that I also find it prudent to point out: 4) I do expect that people who are looking specifically for my stuff should be able to find it. You'd think that #4 would be a simple and straightforward request... and up until some time in 2006 or 2007, it was. Search for the artist and/or album title of any CD that I've reviewed, and voila, it pops up in the search results. Sure, if the search terms are really vague or there are many variants of the same product on the market, it might take a few tries to actually find the product entry that I tied my review to in the database - but no biggie. No search engine automatically knows what you mean. But now? Search for almost any album released within the last two years, and you're bound to find 4 or 5, sometimes even as many as 10, duplicate results for the same product. Even more maddening? Often none of those entries are actually linked to my review of the product in question. Or anyone else's, for that matter. Alright, fine. So Joe Schmo, coming in through the Epinions home page and looking for reviews of the latest Bjork album might never stumble across my personal viewpoint on the subject. Annoying, but I can live with it, because (a) there's still Google, and (b) I can still give out direct links to friends and music critic colleagues who are interested in critiquing my work and/or possibly purchasing a CD that I've written about. Cool. I can keep a running list of those links on my Epinions profile page, or somewhere off-site, and make up for the shocking lack of logical database management exhibited by this site. Well, that assurance ended yesterday. That was when I was greeted with the wonderful surprise of logging into my profile page and seeing that the link to my latest review, a write-up of The Myriad's new album With Arrows, With Poise (which I was particularly excited to tell people about), was greyed out with a note that read: "Product temporarily unavailable". Grrr. Figuring that the permanent link to the site would still work, I used my own handy little profile page to click directly over to the review, and guess what I got? A BLANK PAGE. So now, regardless of how I get to one of my reviews (and potentially more, I haven't looked through my entire backlog of 500-plus entries), it won't display. Seriously, Epinions? "Product Temporarily Unavailable?" What the hell does that even mean? It's still in stores. It's not out of print. The damn thing just came out a couple weeks ago, and sure, it's not a major release or anything, but how could it be in your database one day and gone the next? There are other products still in there that were so obscure that I had to ask a Category Lead to add them (Fauxliage, for example), which is a common practice, and not one that I mind at all. Those didn't get dropped. So what's with this "unavailable" business? Now you're taking away potential hits that should rightfully be mine. That's not cool. I don't care about the fractions of pennies that I'm missing out on, honestly. I do care that someone might actually want to read that stuff and go, "Oh, the page is broken, Never mind." (What's more, searching for "myriad arrows" in the search engine produces the helpful result telling me that no matches were found for "maria arrows". Thanks for assuming I'm too dumb to know how to spell, jack@$$ search engine.) I try to be a good user. I report bugs. I check the message boards to see if there are ongoing discussions about these things. There are. Everyone has been noticing these problems. And the official line from Epinions management seems to be that they're working on them, and that any insistence from one of us that "Hey, I'm a programmer type and I know that this should be an easy fix" doesn't really help because they've got about a million "quick fixes" to deal with, which apparently means that the ones I'm complaining about are low priority. (The same individuals are insisting that the search engine works more beautifully than ever before. Which is hilarious. Perhaps I should start referring to the search engine as "Iraq" and the Epinions staff as "President Bush".) If these were just a few intermittent bugs, I could relax and just do my best to ride them out. But I work on websites for a living. I know that you can only go so long with certain bugs remaining unresolved that are pervasive throughout a website, and new ones appearing out of the woodwork at a faster rate than the old ones are being resolved, before your user base begins to grow more and more irate, and question the integrity of the entire thing. There comes a time when "I'm working on it" is not a valid excuse, and I need to give some of those people a more detailed list of things they can expect me to start troubleshooting ASAP. Everything can't be fixed magically all at once. I'm cool with that. But when the primary function of a website is so radically diminished by one of those weird gremlins, it's time to prioritize the search-and-destroy mission for that particular gremlin. As I understand it, Epinions' main function is to act as a database that allows users to search for various products and display consumer reviews of those products. If it cannot accomplish the basic task of making those reviews available, which their writers have generously put their time and thought into providing, then the entire purpose of the site has been defeated for both the writers and the readers. And that simply isn't the kind of place I want to continue putting so much effort into. Epinions needs to get their act together fast, or I think they'll find that the already diminishing level of community experienced by this site's most active writers is going to become close to nonexistent. You give me a place to write stuff, I write it, I publish it, you make it available for people to read. It's really simple stuff. And it's a truly sad day when Epinions can't keep its end of that ridiculously simple bargain. UPDATE: Some of these bugs have been fixed since I wrote this little rant, so in the interest of fairness, here's what's no longer an issue: * My Myriad review is now displaying. * "Category no longer available" went away. * Search engine is apparently no longer auto-correcting my spelling. * The number of reviews and average rating on a product page seems to actually reflect what's really in the database. * Some product pages (like the above Bjork example) show an average rating and number of reviews, but there is no way to get to the actual reviews. * Some products that were once in the database, and can be found via Google, have disappeared from the search engine and show an error when accessed from Google (such as the Delirious? album Kingdom of Comfort).  |
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