Wize.com, the search engine that ranks products
Wize.com, a San Mateo start-up, has launched yet another search engine for consumer electronics and other goods. — Wize's promise hangs on a single, skinny thread: Its "Wize Rank" concept. Wize Rank is a numeric ranking of products (from zero to 100).
Context & Ripple Effects
Wize.com arrives in the middle of a wave of specialized search launches: two months earlier, Wink bet on social network search for MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn, and Wize is making the same structural wager from the shopping side — that a vertical engine can beat general-purpose search by going deep on one domain.
What separates Wize from other product search entrants, per its confirmed launch details, is Wize Rank: every product gets compressed into a single zero-to-100 score. That makes it less an index than a verdict — a benchmark layered on top of search results.
First-order effects
- Shoppers searching consumer electronics get one numeric ranking instead of a list of links, making Wize's aggregation methodology — not any individual review — the deciding input at purchase time.
Second-order effects
- Manufacturers of low-ranked products now face a public score they do not control, creating pressure to engage with or optimize against whatever signals feed Wize Rank; rival vertical search players must answer with their own scoring layer or compete on raw index breadth alone.
Third-order effects
- If numeric scores become how shoppers compare goods, the company that aggregates opinions holds gatekeeping power over which products sell — a pattern where rankings harden into de facto market standards, with all the gaming and trust disputes that invites.
The trend: Vertical search engines are shifting from organizing links to issuing proprietary scores, turning opinion aggregation into a ranking business.