– □ x

OUR MISSION OF
RADICAL TRANSPARENCY

How We Score

Gadget Review’s True Score system revolutionizes how we evaluate and score products. Our innovative approach blends expert reviews and human assessed Trust Ratings with customer feedback, underpinned by a sophisticated AI tool. This tool utilizes advanced machine learning algorithms and Bayesian models to analyze and synthesize data, ensuring accurate, unbiased, and comprehensive scoring.

Introducing:

True Score

  1. Expert Review Analysis: We start with thousands of verified expert product testers, each contributing detailed, quantifiable reviews. Every expert reviewer is assigned a Trust Rating, a critical metric that helps us identify the credibility and authenticity of their reviews. This step filters out potential fake reviews and ensures that only genuine, high-quality assessments contribute to our scoring.
  2. Customer Review integration: Alongside expert insights, our system incorporates customer reviews. The AI tool analyzes customer sentiment, relevance, and authenticity. This provides a balanced view, reflecting real-world product performance and user satisfaction.
  3. AI-Powered Analysis:Our system leverages a powerful AI engine, integrating machine learning and Bayesian models. This allows for dynamic analysis of a vast array of data points, ranging from detailed expert reviews to real-world customer experiences.
  4. Sophisticated Scoring Matrix: The True Score is derived from a sophisticated scoring matrix. This matrix balances expert Trust Ratings with customer review data, processed through our AI model. The result is a score that accurately reflects both technical excellence and user experience..
  5. Dynamic and Adaptive: Our AI-driven system is dynamic, continually learning and adapting. As new reviews and data emerge, the True Score evolves, ensuring it always reflects the most current and comprehensive information.
  6. Transparency and Reliability: We believe in transparency. Our scoring process is open and transparent, with clear explanations of how scores are derived. This transparency builds trust and ensures users understand the rationale behind each score.

The result is the True Score, a score that truly reflects a product’s quality and performance, derived from a perfect blend of expert analysis and customer experience.

It’s a score that consumers can trust, providing a clear, objective, and comprehensive assessment of a product’s overall value and effectiveness. It’s the “most accurate product score on the web.”

A Simple Breakdown

T

Expert Trust Ratings

We give every site a Trust Rating, which measures how trustworthy that site is in respect to truth and testing.

Customer Reviews

Reviews from e-comm stores (aka customer reviews) are collected and analyzed.

single line arrow
single line arrow

E

Expert Score

An Expert Score is derived from the score given by a publication and it accounts for 75% of the True Score.

C

Customer Score

A Customer Score is taken from a customer review and it accounts for 25% of the True Score.

True Score

The only score you need! Made up of the Expert Score and the Customer Score utilizing a weighted scoring model.

Expert Score_

Accounts for 75% of the True Score

Expert Scores are where we break out the magnifying glasses. We are here to test the testers and assure you that you’re getting trusted information from trustworthy experts.

For that, we’ve got Expert Scores, or ES, which indicates the actual performance of a product in competitive, real world tests. We check what Experts focus on to make sure they’re really doing the legwork. Using this info, we build everything from the bottom up, going from granular to overarching, and then present it to you from the top down so it’s easy to digest.

categories of performance

performance CRITERIA

the reason

publication trust RATING

Customer Score_

Accounts for 25% of the True Score

You can’t ignore the voice of the people. Customers are huge when it comes to understanding how good a product really is. But in today’s world of fake reviews, customer ratings aren’t as safe to rely on as they should be.

And here’s exactly how we made them worth trusting again. Too many reviews on websites are naked ratings. All stars, no substance. These “one tap” reviews are easy to fudge. And even if a product isn’t faking it, many of these reviews are born out of apathy. Think of how easy it is to tap something on your phone.

ONLY VERIFIED REVIEWS

no one-click reviews

Our Scores

There are currently 5 rating levels based on integers of 10 that represent various levels of “quality” of the True Score.

cosmic wonder

90-100 excellent

  • Generally speaking, a Cosmic Wonder is in the top 5% of product rankings
  • More often than not it is recommended on more than 1 Buying Guide.
  • Highest tier product in terms of quality, reliability and trust.

absolutely fresh

80-89 very good

  • In the top 15-20% of products.
  • Sometimes, if not often it is a recommended purchase on at least one buying guide.
  • Very trustworthy brand and reliable .

mixed reviews

70-79 good

  • A good product but the reviews are mixed amongst experts and/or customers.
  • In the top 30% of products.
  • It doesn’t always appear on a Buying Guide but can do so.

MEh

60-69 poor

  • A so-so product that is doesn’t get top scores or very good scores from any publication/expert.
  • Customers can sometimes give them a rate that is acceptable but more often than not higher 4 stars or 80%.
  • Unlikely to be recommended on a Buying Guide

Total Dud

BELOW 60 VERY POOR

  • Don’t buy it
  • A failure on multiple fronts in terms of execution, reliability and trust
  • Many, if not all products in the category are a much better choice.

True Score v2.0: The Bayesian Model_

Update: as of April 2024 all True Scores are now calculated using the True Score v2.0.

The product True Scores are soon going to be recalculated by a Bayesian model, which is a type of probabilistic model. In a Bayesian model, beliefs and uncertainties are expressed in terms of probabilities.

If statistics aren’t your forte, don’t fear, we’ll break it down for you. Imagine you have a question or a problem, but you’re not sure about the answer. For us, our question is, “What is the most accurate and true rating of a product, AKA a product’s True Score?” 

A Bayesian model helps us answer that question based on what we already think and the information we have. We first had two hypotheses on what a product True Score is:

  • One hypothesis was that the higher the Trust Rating of a publication (meaning the more in-depth their testing and transparency is), the more accurate their product rating is.
  • The other hypothesis was that the greater the number of customer reviews a product has, the more accurate that average product rating is.

Then, we gathered evidence that relates to our hypotheses, which we did through our research to get the final Trust Ratings of all sites plus our scraping of the biggest e-commerce retailers for their customer reviews.

The special thing about the model is that it uses probabilities. Probabilities are like chances or possibilities. Instead of saying the True Score is definitely true or false (which we can’t definitively determine), the model tells you how likely a certain True Score is to be true or false.

Our final True Score we give to a product is determined by which integer has the highest probability of being the True Score.

Awards!

Customer favorite

Product rates 90th percentile or higher in Customer Score and has at least 50 customer reviews

expert pick

Product rates 90th percentile or higher in Expert Score & is rated by at least two publications with at least a 60% Trust Rating.

budget friendly

Product scores 60 or higher in True Score and bottom 20% in Price.

HIGHEST RATED

Product scores in the top 1% of True Score in a category.

gr certified legit

Product scores in the top 80th percentile of True Score in a category

best value

Product scores in top 70th percentile or higher of True Score and bottom 40% percentile in Price.

gr recommended award

gr RECOMMENDED

True Score is over 70% with at least 2 trusted testers.

CERtified Product Tester

Publication scores 60% or higher in Trust Rating in a category.

Top X%

Product scores in the top 1%- 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, etc.

MORE AWARDS ARE COMING SOON!