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Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

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Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#21

Post by usefulcat »

mrbig4545 wrote: post #9
FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

Check out the reviews for the PHP book he mentions. Almost all of them are "verified purchase"! And the only negative review isn't one of them.

When the purchase price is so low, astroturfing with "verified purchase" reviews looks to be quite feasible.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#22

Post by walterbell »

How about writing high-quality responses to the bad reviews? I have seen this done by some authors and it usually stops the meaningless reviews, since each additional spam review only creates a new opportunity for the author to present their marketing perspective via comment.

If this were a novel, economically hostile and unsubstantiated feedback would be considered economic warfare.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#23

Post by Ovid »

rcthompson wrote: post #20

In light of that recent article about computer-generated prose being in many cases indistinguishable from human-written, I'd say those fake reviews are likely written by a computer. Notice that they're mostly of the form "I didn't think I'd be interested in [TOPIC] but [TITLE] was really interesting and really helped me learn about [TOPIC]."

That's an interesting thought. I'm pretty sure I could write up a nice grammar to chunk out "interesting" reviews of books. Instead of whining about my book getting buried by fake reviews, maybe I should chuck it and cache in on said reviews!

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#24

Post by benologist »

mrbig4545 wrote: post #9
FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

Don't forget you get most of the money back, on top of which you can make your product/s cheaper or free temporarily.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#25

Post by walterbell »

rcthompson wrote: post #20

In light of that recent article about computer-generated prose being in many cases indistinguishable from human-written, I'd say those fake reviews are likely written by a computer. Notice that they're mostly of the form "I didn't think I'd be interested in [TOPIC] but [TITLE] was really interesting and really helped me learn about [TOPIC]."

Good point. If a small number of parties are selling such a bot service, it may be easier for Amazon to detect and block them at origin.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#26

Post by mstolpm »

mrbig4545 wrote: post #9
FreakyT wrote: post #6

Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books. What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

These ARE verified purchases. You can buy them and just have to pay the reviewer for the purchase (or set the ebook to free for a limited time and let the reviewers download/"buy" the ebook in this timeframe). However, the strategy is not sustainable: Most 5 star reviews get "not helpful" marks and the ranking honors the number of purchases as well. The ebooks in question already get newer 1 star ratings and will take a nosedive when no new fake reviews are coming in.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#27

Post by floatingatoll »

If you have a few minutes to report the issues with the Perl category to Amazon, they accept "catalog feedback" through their 24/7 live chat system.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us

#1: Ignore this section, skip to #2.

#2: From the dropdowns, select: "More order issues", "Give Amazon feedback", "Other feedback topic". In the text box, enter "Catalog feedback".

#3: Click "Chat".

It took me around five minutes to explain that several of the books in the top 100 were incorrectly listed in the Perl category, and they happily accepted the feedback.

Including a direct link to the Perl category helps them tremendously:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011

And I also included a link to the post above.

Edit: Tell them specifically which books, in which top 100 position, are in the wrong category, so that they know which ones aren't Perl.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#28

Post by theVirginian »

jplahn wrote: post #12

I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title, authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negativ…

I would say just include a code inside the box that you can type in to validate your review as an actual purchaser. Then Amazon could heavily weight these reviews, at least for products known to be prone to scam reviews.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#29

Post by MayanAstronaut »

Much like search engines combat black hat SEO, amazon and reviews systems can do the same.

It would not be to hard too for amazon. Use reviews that are a 'Verified Purchase' and highly 'helpful' reviews as a training/test set. Then machine learn a weighting to every review based on the (product, reviewer, other reviews, etc features...)

The outcome could actually hinder tactics like this for products that game the system much like how link farms hurt sites they were propping up when Google figured out how to stop sites from gaming a search engine.

Re: Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

#30

Post by dublinben »

impostervt wrote: post #3

Web cache version, since the site is down for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p... While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only books... Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.

Do you leave your own review on those books to counteract the unearned rating?
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