31–40 of 110 posts
I don't often agree with Nicholas Carr, but in this particular case, the wisdom of the crowds fails miserably, with or without astroturfing.
20% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro's where we were about 80% of the reviews. When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can't resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast. When you combine that with o…
Just out of curiosity, do those "reputation management" companies realize that in serving their clients by making fake reviews, they help destroy end-consumer trust? In many ways, it's the old SEO argument all over again - gaming a system to increase ratings eventually erodes trust in that system, making those increased ratings less valuable. At the same time, refusing to game the system means your business loses pot…
At Stremor.com we have technology that "breaks" SEO so we have better search results at http://www.samuru.com than you would have using link authority. We have tech that can detect writing styles to tell that 6 reviews all came from the same person. We can do this for things like YELP or Amazon product reviews. We also do this to detect web content that was a Paid Review.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know that most people just look at the stars and make a decision. Other people read the good reviews and determine to make their decision from that. I read the bad reviews. 1 to 3 star reviews. I'd rather go to a place with a bifrication of bad and good reviews where the bad reviews are stuff I don't care about... My theory is that if a place sucks it will definitely have bad reviews. A place that is great will sti…
There's no reason that a rival company couldn't fake negative reviews though. I'm sure it's common already.
Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 20% figure represents the percentage of filtered reviews on Yelp. These are reviews that Yelp finds suspicious enough to not publish. Some filtered reviews may be fake, and some mig…
I was offered a hotel discount if I posted a (good) review for the place. Just another source of biased commentary.
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I think that you haven't been looking for it, then: that exact thing is hugely important to Yelp and is why they filter out so many reviews in the first place!
I've found that Foursquare has a higher signal-to-noise than Yelp for restaurant reviews/tips.
That said, I assume that their 0.0-10.0 ratings they introduced a few months ago are basically random.
I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion here about the accuracy of the 20% figure, but that actually doesn't seem as important as the other findings from the research this article cites ("Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud", http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf ). The interesting points from the research include: 1) Low ratings increase incentives for positive r…
If you have low ratings, of course you're tempted to get some fake positive reviews. If you have a lot of reviews, adding a few positive ones will not affect the overall score much--it's a drop in the bucket. Chain restaurants, well, everyone knows what McDonald's is, what would they gain from posting fake reviews?
Businesses that claim their Yelp page have more interest in Yelp? Shouldn't it be the other way around, businesses who have decided they're interested in Yelp will claim their page? Claiming your Yelp page is a sign that you care; businesses that do not care about Yelp will not commit review fraud.
Who else would post negative fake reviews but competitors? I guess reputation management companies could post negative fake reviews in an attempt to drum up business.
An increase in competition encourages more negative fake reviews? I mean, if a business has no competitors, who has an interest in posting fake reviews? This ties to #5, where competitors are the ones who post negative reviews. More competitors, more fraud.