Compare Before You Buy

Lately I've been pretty cagey about movies -- at $10 a ticket, $6 for kids, it's nearly $40 for our family of 5 to even get in the door -- then add another $40, at least, for popcorn and drinks. If I'm going to spend that kind of money on a movie, it had better be good.

So I check out MetaCritic when I'm considering a movie. MetaCritic compiles reviews from dozens of papers, assigns them a point value from 1-100, and averages them, giving you a pretty good indication of where reviewers stand.

The new site Wize aims to be a kind of MetaCritic for goods. They compile reviews from Amazon, NewEgg, and elsewhere into a score from 1-100, where 90 and up are highly recommended, 75-89 are ok, and so on. The Wize Score is displayed prominently next to each entry. Look at this page for HP printers, for example. If I were in the market for an HP printer, this would be all the information I'd need -- best price, breakdown of reviews according to whether they were made by users or experts, and a great big box with a clear number telling me at a glance what the outcome is. I might not buy based on that number, but it would sure tell me which HP printers were worth taking a look at.

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