The new Omgili Product Reviews service searches the web for product reviews and user opinions from catalogue pages such as Amazon reviews, bulletin boards, forums and other conversation sources. We covered Omgili fleetingly but favourably back in August last year, so it’s good to see this web forum search engine roll out something so cool.

The good points include the excellent ratings graphic (miserable to excellent) which gives a super fast overview of a product’s review position. This really makes it easy to see whether a product you’re interested in is a lemon or star. Unfortunately the search database is not yet as comprehensive as it should be which clearly reflects the early nature of the service. For a good example of the potential of the site though, try searching for iPhone.

The individual product results pages also offer up review buzz info over time periods, which is useful if you’re looking to see what people thought about a product recall or price increase announced last year etc etc. Another neat feature is the inclusion of a link at the bottom of the results page to post your own question to Yedda.com if you can’t find what you’re looking for. It’s a great idea because you’re adding to the conversation and therefore building up the knowledgebase (assuming your request gets an answer of course). This really should be featured much more prominently.

Overall this is a great effort and with a more complete product database this could become an indispensable part of our shopping tool set. Next stop is to deliver this functionality to a mobile phone so we can access it while standing in front of a snarky salesman in the store.