Analyze Amazon reviews for authenticity
Shopping websites like Amazon support review systems that allow customers to leave reviews for products on the site.
Designed to add unique content and information to shopping sites, ratings are often also used when it comes to an item's visibility on a site.
Customers who buy online may rely on reviews more than they rely on product descriptions to make buying decisions.
This in turn makes it very profitable to push reviews for products. This is called fake reviews, and it usually involves someone paying reviewers to leave reviews on a shopping site.
Some sites may prevent anyone but customers who actually purchased an item from leaving reviews, but there are ways around this, for instance by handing out free samples.
Analyze Amazon reviews for authenticity
While it is often easy enough to spot fake reviews, as they tend to always give the highest rating and glorify the product, it has become more difficult in recent time to distinguish between legitimate and fake reviews.
This guide provides you with information on two Internet services that you can make use of to analyze Amazon reviews.
Fakespot
Fakespot is a free service that accepts any Amazon product or Yelp business link. Simply paste the link in the form on the start page, and wait for the analysis of the product to show up.
If the product is known already, results are displayed right away. If it is not, Fakespot starts to pull data from Amazon to analyze the reviews.
Fakespot grades the product reviews of the item, displays an adjusted rating, Amazon's rating, and provides you with information on the authenticity of the ratings.
It may for instance tell you that "there are indications of inauthentic/low quality reviews". The analysis digs deeper than that, as it provides you with information on the reviews.
It may give you words used to describe the product, the percentage of low quality reviews, and even information on inauthentic reviews, and why they were classified as that (automation, correlation with other fake reviewer profile data and languages).
Fakespot supports only Amazon.com, but no regional Amazon sites.
ReviewMeta
ReviewMeta works in pretty much the same fashion. Paste an Amazon url into the form on the site, and the program will start to analyze the product if it is not already in the database, or display results right away.
The service will adjust the rating and reviews based on its algorithm, display a report card that highlights checks the product reviews passed, failed or looked suspicious, and lists most and least trusted reviews.
What follows is a detailed analysis of all reviews. ReviewMeta lists the ratio of one-time reviewers to reviewers who have left multiple reviews on Amazon, the percentage of reviewers without any verified purchases, phrase repetition, and a lot more.
ReviewMeta supports regional Amazon sites.
Closing Words
Both Fakespot and ReviewMeta provide an interesting service that you can make use of to verify ratings and reviews on Amazon. While you can use it to authenticate reviews for any product that you are interested in, it probably makes the most sense for mid-price and expensive products considering that you will spend time using the services for each product you are interested in.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.