Ask HN: Would you use a review sentiment search engine?

This is a great idea. I would use it. In fact, I want to build it! I've been reading about sentiment analysis as part of my research, and I had this idea literally the other day: I was looking for laptop batteries and I did not have the patience to search through some N number of Amazon/eBay/other storefronts. The second issue was the fact reviews range from 1 star to 5 star on the same product BUT a crucial fact was that more recent reviews are more relevant (for instance, if everyone from the past 3 months is rating it 1 star, vs. only 5 star where all previous bad reviews were from 3+ years ago).

So how would you define sentiment? A single score on a range from "good" to "bad"? Multidimensional, like a range of emotions? A major problem I've found in sentiment analysis literature that some assumptions/models yield limited/poor results even if algorithms are good.

Have you started working on this? I'd be happy to discuss it or your ideas some more.

I agree with @manmeet that the algorithm for the sentiment analysis has to be great; the search algorithm also has to be tremendous to convince me to switch from Google or DuckDuckGo. To avoid the challenge of making a new search engine, maybe you could build a plugin?

Somewhat similar sentiment analysis, for terms rather than unique entities: http://www.whatdoestheinternetthink.net

This sounds very similar to what I do for web hosting reviews. For instance, take a look at Digital Ocean's reviews: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean/

It calculates an overall (based on all pos/neg things said) but breaks down into components relevant to web hosting: support, uptime, price. You can also figure out who competitors are and see trends.

If you can't tell, I like the idea. I also think it's an incredibly hard problem to solve. I've done it for a small niche. Scaling it to a general solution is something I haven't been able to figure out (yet).

I think its a pretty good idea. All depends on how well u design your algorithm. I had a similar idea but wanted to use twitter to get sentiment regarding anything, from people to movies to devices or services.