We've covered Grayboxx pretty extensively since before its launch (see here). With considerable funding from Sierra Ventures and the addition of Rajeev Motwani, who advised the Google founders on the creation of the Page Rank system, Grayboxx has been an interesting local search tool to follow, especially considering all that's going on with human-powered search, semantic search, and an overall heightened attention level now being given to more quality search.
Today marks Grayboxx's venture into even more cities across the nation, and the release of a few upgrades to the service. While Grayboxx tested extensively in the small city and town market, Bob Chandra, CEO of Grayboxx, says the company is now ready to tackle larger markets, given the positive response seen during its testing phase. You may recall that Grayboxx's claim to fame is its Preference Score system, which pulls explicit data from various resources such as purchases, online reservations, etc. While the information provided to Grayboxx in personally non-identifiable, it does lend itself to a very quantitative approach to creating a useful search engine.
In speaking with Chandra about the upcoming features on Grayboxx, it was important for me to keep this distinction in the back of my mind, because one of these features looks to veer ever so slightly away from the explicit approach to Grayboxx's search tool. In responding to user feedback, Grayboxx found it important to allow users to add their own reviews for businesses directly into Grayboxx. As Grayboxx gets the majority of its information from a factual basis while also lending itself as a segue for reviews on third-party resources, this inclusion of user-generated content is an important step for Grayboxx that it has considered greatly.
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My first thought about this new feature was, "will this make users perceive Grayboxx as a typical product review site?" Chandra responded, "I hope not! We see explicit reviews as the icing on the cake." That being said, I then wondered how deeply these new user generated business reviews would be integrated into Grayboxx overall. When asked if there would be any incorporation of user-generated reviews into the Grayboxx Preference Score, Chandra replied, "we may in the future, but right now they're separate. We want to avoid confusion between qualitative and quantitative content."
With that, Chandra also admitted that third-party review sites, such as self-published expert blogs, are rich in quantitative content. I couldn't help but think about most business reviews and how they come about. As a consumer, you typically take the time to leave a review only when you've had an extreme experience, whether it be good or bad. Otherwise, it's a central concern that product review communities typically have--pulling qualitative data from users. While Vi ewpoints has done a good job of garnering data from users without always getting direct reviews, most product review sites have a hard time with consistency.