I just broke my Zyliss jumbo garlic press so was in the market for a new one. Zyliss was considered #1 when I bought it 4 years ago but did I want to get another one? It obviously didn’t last as long as I wanted, and it was pretty pricey ($17 for a garlic press). Is there something better out there? So I went searching for a new garlic press.

When you look at a product category and see a list of products, how do you expect the list to be ordered? What’s most helpful? Amazon.com thinks that you want to see a ranked list of bestselling products by default, with options for sorting by price and average customer review. Most service sites like Yelp.com or Tripadvisor.com have a ranked list by top-rated. Here at Buzzillions we’ve decided that top-rated is probably the most helpful for our users as we’re not a merchant site like Amazon.com.

We all know how addicted we are to top 10 lists. Nothing exists in a vacuum. We love to compare things to one another. How many times have you had arguments with friends over which restaurant is better? Or what the top movies were for last year?

However, the question now is: how do you decide the rating for a product? What makes one product better than another? What makes a product #1?

One obvious answer is go by the rating. A 5 star product is better than a 4 star product. Duh. But then what happens if two products have the same star rating but one has more reviews? Again, duh, the product with more reviews is probably a better product. But why? Because the more reviews a product has the more confidence we have in the star rating. If a product only has one review, how can we be sure we’ll agree with it? What if the person who wrote that review is not like me at all? How can I trust what that person says? But if a product has ten reviews, now that’s approaching consensus. And if a product has 100 reviews, then we can be pretty sure that chances are, we’ll agree with them.

Pretty easy so far. However, when we look at an actual list of hundreds of products it gets much more complicated. How do you compare product A with a 5 star rating but only 5 reviews against product B with a 4.8 star rating but 30 reviews? How do you compare product C with a 4 star rating made up of one 5 star review and one 1 star review against product D with the same 4 star rating but made up of two 4 star reviews? Is it useful to see out of stock products (like old models no longer manufactured) on the same list as current in stock products?

I don’t have the answers to all these questions but it’s something I and the Buzzilions team are constantly working on, finding the best way to present the information we have so you, the shopper, can make an informed confident decision.

Note: So which garlic press did I get?  I ended up going to a restaurant supply store and buying one based on their recommendation.