Who own's reviews?

I am sick of reviews being spread all over the web. Some websites have started to aggregate reviews from all over, but this is just the beginning. It must be more than this. One example is Google offering reviews when you do a search on Google Maps for businesses. They have reviews from Yahoo!, Yelp and etc. These reviews are mostly for restaurants and bars, but other businesses have some reviews too.

I think the worst are product reviews such as appliances and niches not covered well by the likes of Amazon. If I search for the model number of the dishwasher I want to buy I usually get no reviews, similar dishwashers have reviews, but how "similar" are they? Are the main components the exact same? Does that translate into the same performance?

So who actually owns the reviews? The website someone put them into, probably technically. But, why would someone put out a review unless they want to share it with others? Wouldn't they want the biggest possible audience to see it. They should be in the Public Domain, they should not be privately possessed unless the review or comments are collected by or for the actual company being reviewed.

I would like to see Reviews made into a open source set of data. That way people searching could get a much bigger return on their search. By having them in a standard format everybody could access them. You could do mashups like you can with Google Maps. Make them part of a type of open source wiki of reviews.

I think I am dissuaded at times to leave reviews, because I don't know where to leave them. I usually search for reviews on multiple sites, so which of those should I leave the review on? All of them? Its confusing and frustrating, if there was a way I knew most people searching for a review could find it I would do it that way. So maybe like a wikipedia of reveiws.

It also could be part of an open id so that in someones profile are all the reviews that person has ever written. Those reviews would be "hosted" by the person who wrote them or Google or someone else could facilitate hosting people's review profiles. That way a search would turn up all relevant reviews (as long as criteria for how reviews are setup are followed).

Next Search Engine...a Google Killer? -- Part 1

Google is great, but not always. If you don't know exactly what you are looking for (i.e. the exact phrases) you are screwed; you have to go through page after page of useless links and waste a lot of time. How do you fix that? It's going to be a ton of trial and error, but I think combining aspects of:

• Digg.com - digging or burying sites/(mostly news articles now) that are good, relevant, interesting or sites that need to be kicked to the curb. Adding comments can be very helpful (of course the comments themselves should be rated so that the best show up first).
• Del.icio.us - tagging the contents of each site or page is a very cool concept. The personal tagging is cool, but when it is done collectively and shared it is ground-breaking. Admittedly they are doing a lot more with this lately, but it can still be hard to find the relevant sites to what you want. What is up with squishing words together to tag them (i.e. BusinessStartup) other sites like Google sites allow spaces between words.
• Yahoo.com (old) - directory type portal with categories. People like things pigeon holed into categories, but they also have drawbacks like confusion over which category contains the type of site I want. The new Yahoo! is way to commercialized, it is like a TV channel or a walled garden - whoever has the money gets featured.
• Technorati.com - probably the closest thing to what I see as a complete part of the killer search engine, but it is mainly for blogs. The "Where's the Fire" is very cool, and you can add "blurbs" about topics.
• Google.com - to me it seems that they are sitting on a ton of techniques and functionality that is spread throughout the Google world (I am a big fan of Gmail, Google Docs, Blog Reader, and many more). I think that they may be getting ready to play the card to end the race for the next search engine, as a lot of the puzzle pieces are there but they have not been put together in an effective manner yet.
• Amazon.com - the Recommendations, however annoying they may seem, are very cool. A form of pseudo-AI using personality profiles to find relevant sites or news for people could be a key component.
• Academic Search engines - the articles have keywords and abstracts to help you narrow down which articles are worth reading. This type of information about websites would be a huge boost to finding the right site.

NOTE: To clarify, what I am proposing is not a way to do a better word search like Google, but to change how people can find information that they need.

Next, I will look at the actual components to combine into the Next Search interface.

-Karl