71–80 of 110 posts
Google should be promoting sites that provide value to their users.
Considering the quality of Yelp, I really don't think they should be showing up in the search results.
However, it would take a huge culture change at Google for Yelp to stop showing up in search results, IMO. Even if the quality of their reviews continues to degrade.
I run a small review site and have to deal with issues surrounding fake reviews all the time. Every now and then someone makes a rookie mistake and it gets picked up by my system and automatically filtered but as the years have gone on, I've found people are becoming better at gaming us. I believe there is value in reviews, especially at a local level; I've found out about some really great local businesses based on…
I guess this is what YouTube is for...
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…
The thing with Tragedy of the Commons is that recognizing the fact that it exists doesn't change the fact that defection is still the optimum reward-maximizing strategy.
> 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.
And not gaming the system means that you get less short-term returns while everyone else games the system, gets better short-term returns, and still erodes public trust in the system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't do reputation management anymore. Now I build tools to do real reputation analysis, and fight the very things I used to do. I'm like Darth Vader in the last few moments of his life... Only I plan to live a long while. 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 style…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't do reputation management anymore. Now I build tools to do real reputation analysis, and fight the very things I used to do. I'm like Darth Vader in the last few moments of his life... Only I plan to live a long while. 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 style…
so can I pass Samuru a link to a particular Amazon product and it'll tell me how many of the reviews have a similar writing style therefore possibly being fake?
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…
To me what this means is you can't trust a positive signal, but you still can trust a negative one. If it's really that bad, then they're clearly not on the ball.
Just an example.
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…
Yelp is widely believed (among business owners) to wield review filtering/deletion as a club to "encourage" small businesses to buy advertising on yelp.com.
The economic incentives behind review fraud seem pretty obvious to me.
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.
Its the reviewers who need to be reviewed. Or, in a true social sense trusted reviewers should be followed and the rest ignored.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't do reputation management anymore. Now I build tools to do real reputation analysis, and fight the very things I used to do. I'm like Darth Vader in the last few moments of his life... Only I plan to live a long while. 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 style…
so can I pass Samuru a link to a particular Amazon product and it'll tell me how many of the reviews have a similar writing style therefore possibly being fake?