The New York Times yesterday reported that fake reviews are a growing trend. The story concentrates on tourism and product review sites.

Product owners, marketing agencies or individuals can buy reviews online for a small amount of money. If you visit Fiverr for instance, you will notice that you can buy positive reviews for $5 on almost every site imaginable. But Fiverr ist just one of the sites where you find people willing to put up fake reviews on websites.

The ingenious aspect of this is that hiring people to post fake reviews bypasses most of the site’s fake detection security. If you were to do it on your own, you would connect with certain characteristics like the computer’s IP address, browser version or operating system which might be used to identify manipulation, even if proxy servers or virtual private network connections were used. A single cookie could be enough for that.

But with unique users from all over the world, it is not possible to use hard facts to identify fraud.

Cornell researchers recently published a paper about fake review detection. The algorithmic approach looks for strong and slight deceptive indicators in a review to determine whether it is fake or not. Indicators on the other hand are not proof, and it will happen that the algorithm detects legit reviews as fake and vice verse.

Some sites could implement a better procedure to avoid the majority of fake reviews. Amazon for instance could only allow reviews by users who have purchased the product on their site. While that would certainly reduce the number of reviews on site, it would eliminate the majority of fake reviews as well.

Businesses who use these marketing techniques will adapt. They would simply have to do some initial teaching, or review writing of their own, to deceive the algorithm.

One element that has not been mentioned yet, and that has not been addressed in the paper, is the option to write fake reviews with a less than perfect rating. I personally read the negative reviews first on most sites to get an understanding of what’s wrong with a product. Some complaints here are less serious than others. A picky user might complain that the product arrived late, or that the breakfast buffet at the hotel did not have enough carrots on one day. Those might be serious issues for them, but they might not be serious to the majority of potential customers.

My guess is that we will see better fake reviews in the coming years. We will see fake reviews with less-than-perfect ratings, and fake reviews that use the findings of the research paper to avoid detection.

Your take on fake reviews on the Internet? Let me know in the comments.

Categories range from computer hardware to digital cameras and camcorders, office equipment and even baby and kid stuff. Users looking for a specific product can use the search form on top of the service which will display suggestions during the process. The approach is best suited to find a specific product quickly as it makes more sense to type in the product name directly than to browse the specific category on the website.

Browsing one of the categories is the better approach if you know that you need a new product but have no specific company and model in mind. Products can be sorted by various means including price, popularity, name or FreakScore. FreakScore is a weighted index of all aggregated professional and user reviews. The main advantage of this approach is that scores from different review sites and user reviews are combined to compute a better score for each product.

Expert and user reviews can be read to get a better understanding of the score. Testfreaks mashes up reviews from sites like Amazon with reviews on professional review sites like Benchmark reviews.

There is also no ingame footage but great drawings that visually explain what Yahtzee is talking about at the moment. I personally think that his reviews are up to the point and really funny to watch and listen to.

I decided to embed a few of his latest reviews, those of Half-life 2 Orange Box, Bioshock and Halo 3. All others can be viewed by following the link at the end of this article.

via Zero Punctuation