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20% of Yelp reviews are fake

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Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#81

Post by bapbap »

agilebyte wrote: post #73
bapbap wrote: post #65

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…

Make it more expensive by having video reviews? I suspect people are better at detecting lies in people than they are in a block of text. I guess this is what YouTube is for...

Not a bad idea actually but even at that, there are plenty of video reviewers getting paid to review things and one could be none the wiser.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#82

Post by drakaal »

gzervas wrote: post #67
drakaal wrote: post #6

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…

We'd love to incorporate your data in our analysis if you are willing to share.

I'm Brandon at Stremor com if you want to drop me a message.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#83

Post by genwin »

mathattack wrote: post #58
drakaal wrote: post #6

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.

When using Trip Advisor I skip over reviews where the reviewer has only 1 review. I assume they are written by competitors. A hotel could have many pages of favorable reviews, yet the reviewer with only 1 review under his/her belt will likely report something disgusting like bed bugs or blood stains.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#84

Post by smtddr »

baddox wrote: post #70
smtddr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't consider the owner's friend's review to be "fake." I would. If Obama wrote a book and his childhood friend reviewed it on Amazon, I would discount that review. Or at least consider it highly suspect.

Can you articulate exactly why you wouldn't value that review? I would only consider a review "fake" and discount it if I thought the reviewer hadn't actually experienced the item being reviewed, or was externally incentivized (e.g. paid) to compose the review. Merely discounting a review for being "biased" doesn't seem wise to me. Presumably, the childhood friend of Obama actually did enjoy the book, and the friend…

> Merely discounting a review for being "biased" doesn't seem wise to me.

To me, fake and biased are not too far apart considering the context that I expect reviews on books, restaurants, etc. to come from random people who don't have any particular reason to like or dislike the product outside of the quality of the product itself. I believe friends & family are too close to the product to give a review without external-factors influencing. It's true that the friend could have truly enjoyed the product, but I still think the chances that their review was influenced by their friendship is high enough to make the review suspect.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#85

Post by aaron695 »

fotbr wrote: post #29
drakaal wrote: post #6

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…

> do those "reputation management" companies realize that in serving their clients by making fake reviews, they help destroy end-consumer trust?

Don't really see the relevance this is advertising and most industries in general.

Look at the clothing industry, we all could be wearing sacks right now, but people realised if I wear a nicer sack than everyone else it'll up my born attractiveness and so the race begins, back to where we started worrying about clothing as well as dealing with our born attractiveness.

Do the people participating in these industries know they are not improving the world and destroying things like customer trust, probably not. But that's most people.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#86

Post by gzervas »

baddox wrote: post #48
drakaal wrote: post #6

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…

I wouldn't consider the owner's friend's review to be "fake." As for the owner him/herself, that might feel a bit unethical, but I still wouldn't call it "fake."

If there exists a material connection between the owner and the reviewer which is not disclosed in the review then the FTC considers this to be deceptive advertising. A material connection is defined to be something "that is, important to a consumer's decision to buy or use the product." See here: http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus35-advertising-faqs...

So while you might not consider such a review as fake, my understanding is that the FTC would.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#87

Post by foobarian »

Aloisius wrote: post #9
bobf wrote: post #3

Another problem I've seen with Yelp is reviews that aren't actually for the intended place. My father-in-law owns a few restaurants. One of them has >300 reviews (solid 4 stars), but shares part of its' name with another restaurant with >1500 reviews (3.5 stars, with a heavy downward trend). Most reviews posted for his restaurant are either 4 or 5 stars, with the majority of lower reviews referencing the other restau…

Change your name. Seriously. Even without Yelp, you don't want potential customers hearing via word of mouth about how bad your restaurant was when it really was the one down the street. Names are relatively cheap to change and if you select a name that is related (like say, shortening it or incorporating part of the old name in the new one) and communicate what is going on with regulars, you'll limit any short-term…

I worked at a review site and have decided that if I ever open a restaurant I will name it 'null' or 'NullPointerException.' The hilarity that would ensue from this would be priceless.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#88

Post by gzervas »

nkoren wrote: post #69
gzervas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what goes into Yelp's filter either. I also agree that it can make mistakes. At the same time, I do think that the filter is more likely to catch a fake review than it is to catch a real review. This is the assumption our analysis relies on. (Not sure what I should be rethinking...)

Might want to re-think that exact assumption: http://justinvincent.com/page/1874/yelp-you-cost-me-2000-by-... I understand that this is one anecdote, but I've seen enough similar cases of misapplied filtering to take it seriously.

While I read such anecdotes, I cannot rely much on them for research. Instead, what we did for our paper was to collect thousands of filtered reviews, and check their characteristics against reviews Yelp publishes. We find that filtered reviews are shorter, more likely to be from one-time reviewers, more likely to be extreme (1- or 5-stars), and so on. I realize this does not constitute absolute proof but at least it's evidence based on data. Check the paper for more stats.

Beyond that, and as a counter-anecdote, I have read hundreds (if not thousands!) of filtered reviews over the past year and in my experience they are more likely to be fake. Furthermore, one implication of challenging our assumption is that you are suggesting consumers would be better off reading, and basing their decisions on filtered reviews since -- by your assumption -- they are more likely to be genuine. As I said, I cannot offer proof, but given what I have seen I believe the filter to be more likely to catch a fake review than a real review.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#89

Post by gzervas »

auctiontheory wrote: post #78
gzervas wrote: post #22

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…

Filtered reviews are a terrible proxy for fake reviews! 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.

That's why we checked whether advertisers are getting preferential filtering treatment. (They aren't according to our data.) Read my previous comment, or better yet read the paper where we also explain possible pitfalls in the analysis.

Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake

#90

Post by unclebucknasty »

mathattack wrote: post #58
drakaal wrote: post #6

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.

In addition to gaming competitors, there are unreasonable customers who can't be trusted. So, technically, the review is from an actual customer, but still cannot be relied upon.

And, the problem is compounded by the fact that more people are apt to write a review if they have a negative experience. This can really skew the results in a negative direction.

The whole paradigm of reviews as they are currently implemented is just plain broken.

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