A few years ago, picking entertainment, restaurants, or businesses, was arduous because, without structured data, users were left to sift through message boards and blog posts or rely on biased promotional material.
Sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp, and TripAdvisor have given users simple ways to rate and describe their experiences so others can quickly find the best options.
Ironically, one of the few industries that has not been crowd-rated and crowd-curated on the web is the web itself.
Searches for “best photo sharing website to use” or “options for doing taxes online” lead users to, at best, old articles that compare services, and, at worst, a dizzying world of forums and user comments about which sites are best for what.
Increasingly, our experiences are entirely web-based, with streaming media sites, financial tools, dating services, e-commerce shops, and gaming destinations, gaining market-share on their physical counterparts. And the growing amount of online competitors in every industry makes deciding which sites to use more and more difficult.
People want to know, given a web-service category, “What’s the site?”
