Doug Baker of Wize picked up Jux2 on eBay, with a little help from “some faster-than human bidding software,” he wrote on the company’s blog.

“Why? Well, the technology looked promising and I thought it would either become a great investment or a spectacular gaffe that would not soon be forgotten by my wife, friends, business partners, etc,” he said.

Baker envisioned applying the technology behind Jux2 to a particular vertical niche, in their case product research. He elaborated on this in the post:

On the Wize website, the company noted how WizeRank for a product can be earned, not purchased. The only thing that can improve a Wize Rank is more positive data collected from independent sources, the site said.

Wize carries contextual advertising, and links to purchase products as provided by eBay’s Shopping.com. It draws reviews from shopping sites like Amazon, Shopping.com, and Pricegrabber to help construct its WizeRank ratings.

“I’m still convinced that the purchase was a steal,” Baker said.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Hard as they try, the affiliate links, spam and irrelevant content plague search results. There are a number of recommendation shopping sites and recently popular social shopping sites available to perform product research, but the information is often narrow or biased.

There’s a new kid on the block called Wize.com that we’ve been working with and I have to say, it’s a pretty impressive research tool for consumer products. The site launced today and it’s worth checking out.

Doug Baker, the internet entreprenuer who created Wize.com has taken the notion of collective wisdom, made popular by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki’s 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds” and combined it with the technology behind the jux2.com search engine he purchased earlier this year to create an easy to use comparison shopping and product research web site.

Wize.com consolidates expert and consumer-written reviews for over ten thousand consumer products and then sorts them by “Wize Rank”, a score between 0-100. The “Wize Rank” score is determined by the content of the consumer and expert product reviews and provides a quick metric for comparison.

Here’s a list of the products that have achieved the maximum Wize Rank score of 100.

This is the kind of search function that really makes me optimistic about how social media and consumer generated media can be used to make search better. That is, taking thousands and some day, millions of editorial decisions about content, in this case product reviews, and applying an algorithmic ranking to it.

Sites like Wize.com can serve consumers by providing the information they need during all phases of the buying cycle: from product information to links to online vendors for purchasing.

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.