I performed a comparative analysis of 1" GHD and CHI flattening irons based on summarizing online user reviews. You can perhaps compare any two products, by combining several user reviews from relevant or authoritative forums or web sites. Consider this: Perhaps you have read user reviews of hair straighteners or flattening irons, to try get an overall impression of a particular brand or model. You may have comprehensively navigated various hair style or product seller internet sites, review sites, personal blogs, forums, and auction sites, to try get at least a feel for a preferred hair iron unit. In addition, you may have also performed advanced search parameters for best hair straighteners, and global insight trend analysis, listening to family and friends, visited professional salons and local stores, read local fashion newspapers and magazines and more. Image of Thinking by yoshiaka at sxc.Then you find a hair iron (or two), that you may like, or hope to like, and have come across several reviews at a popular or authoritative online web site. But then their are hundreds of reviews, and if comparing a few flattening irons, hundreds more reviews, and that's only from one internet site. So how can you easily extract an overall rating, or impression?
Analyzing Hair Straightener Reviews - What's the Overall Thought? or Feeling?
You may be instantly able to intuitively get an overall impression or common theme by reading and comparing a few reviews. But let's say you are prepared to spend a few hundred dollars from a reputable trusted hair care or auction web site, and you do want to read at least dozens of reviews to try grasp an overall impression for your selected flattening irons. Such focused or specific extracted information may well influence your decision to purchase a hair unit - or not.
One way, is to review the reviews to try extract what the common theme, intent, or even perceived emotion within the reviews. Such text retrieval can be achieved with text based utilities to highlight or extract frequent qualifiers or descriptor text for easy comparison. Thus keyword or text mining tools are ideal for instantly displaying frequent key words or phrases, often descriptive qualifiers or adjectives for your selected (or soon to be) flattening iron. Further you may be able to get an idea of the intent of users, their overall feelings, from reoccurring key words about a hair iron from those reviews.
Online Text Mining Utilities: Discover Focused Key Terms for Hair Straighteners
I used three search and text mining tools: Search Cloudlet a Firefox add-on (which I described for best hair iron online search tips - Please refer to that best search tips article for applying search "clouds"for hair search analysis), Wordle - a text "cloud" generator of varying text sizes depending on frequency), and Textalyser - a comprehensive statistical text analyzer that generates meaningful word out puts - e.g. phrase frequencies, top words, densities, word count, sentence count, and much more. They are all simple to use, but significantly, can instantly produce frequently used and easily visible word patterns related to "text mining" techniques to help you get a more focused overview for numerous hair iron reviews.
Conducting Review Analysis of GHD vs CHI
Let's research user reviews for two similar size and shape hair straighteners - The 1" GHD Classic Styler Ceramic Hair Straightener and The CHI 1"Ceramic Flat Iron. Using the Wordle dialog box, I copied about three sets of 20 reviews from Folica com for those irons and pasted them separately in the Wordle dialog box, after clicking the link "create your own" from their home page. Note also - their are thousands of reviews for individual hair irons, of which a text mining tool might be invaluable.
I made sure that there were a roughly equivalent number of text per page - which was about 800 words for one A4 page. Below are "cloudlets" for only one A4 page - but the others were similar in displayed output. But please note, the intention here is to demonstrate any effectiveness in comparison with word mining utilities between the hair irons, rather than to explicitly imply that one iron is better than the other.
Click images for enlarged view in a new tab
GHD Classic Styler Ceramic Wordle Cloud
CHI 1" Ceramic Wordle Cloud
Review Analysis - Any Significant Patterns?
* The GHD term stands out in it's cloud more than once, more so than CHI in it's cloud. It might mean that users have more affinity for that name, as a brand, as hence include the term GHD more often in their reviews. Note also that the term straightener, as is iron are noticeable, perhaps meaning that those terms be rightfully included in the reviews as both terms are suited together. However the CHI cloud only has reference to Iron. Does this mean that GHD is the unit worthy of mention to include both terms? (After all it might be perceived better for about hair styling)
* Though both irons have similar qualifiers (e.g. "wonderful", amazing", "best", "love"), it seems that GHD qualifiers are more frequent and are a bit more superlative. Does this mean GHD is more worthy of such terms? Or perhaps reviewers are overstating it's qualities? One way is to analyze more reviews to try get a more representative and statistically meaningful results or patterns.
* There seems to be more nouns for CHI cloud, and are a bit diverse, whereas the GHD cloud terms are more quality related and focused (in my view). CHI has terms that seem to relate to getting or purchasing (e.g. "Got", "Get", "Product", "Works" and "Price") it as a product, rather than mentioning features about the product.
* There are no negative terms relating to GHD, but there is for CHI - but again more research may be required.
* Well - what do you think? Which aggregated review analysis points to the straightener that you would prefer to purchase? Lets do a bit more analysis with what phrases are more favorable, by using the textalyser tool...
In-depth Text Analysis of Hair Straightener Reviews
Here are some charts relating to top words, and three word phrases for both the same user reviews, for the same two hair straighteners. There are many other statistical text results that can generate meaningful aggregate summaries, from the reviews in aggregate, from their web site. Visit the textalyser site and paste in your reviews in their dialog box, and then click on analyze the text to produce a stack of text statistics. Note you may have to correct spelling mistakes and grammar errors beforehand from the reviews.
GHD Classic Styler Ceramic Top Words
CHI 1" Ceramic Top Words
The tabled hair iron results, for top words are similar to the above cloud results. It appears that GHD has better qualifiers, e.g. "love" and "best", and CHI also refers to product and price - which were also evident in the CHI cloud above. Below are charts (truncated - as the tables were too long), for top 3 phrase terms for the same hair irons.3 Word Phrases for GHD Styler Hair Iron
3 Word Phrases for CHI Flat Iron
Again, it appears that GHD has more favorable 3 word phrases, relating to qualitative attributes (e.g. "recommend", "best", "amazing"), and CHI seem to refer to passive type terms, without signifying much in relation to it's iron. Results were similar for 2 word phrases, and even for 4 word phrases.
Review Summary
So if you have the time and inclination, then try text extraction or mining tools. This can be important, particularly for comprehensive reviews, and collation of hundreds of reviews for hair irons, if you seriously intend to purchase a hair iron. You can weed out insightful concepts, and with careful analysis be in a much better position to select a hair straightener that appeals to you. Reviews help, but more so if you can do a bulk analysis to garner relevant information, knowledge, and satisfaction, to your advantage, before deciding to purchase a hair iron of your preferred choice.
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