Abstract
Although product design targets success, the achievement of success is rarely verified or insightfully explored because of difficulties in measuring this term. The present paper addresses design research by proposing a procedure to extrapolate success of products by means of the vast knowledge made available by the scientific literature and the Internet at large. The final achievements are constituted by an algorithm to perform information search about product success and a success scale to be used as an ordinal variable in a posteriori studies involving large numbers of products.