About 50% of Reviews Online are Bogus

May 22, 2009 porkchop No comments

It is a fact that most people online, use the Internet to research and find reviews of any kind of products ranging from multi-vitamins to computer hardware and most of the time the reviews are fake or misleading. There has been in the past a few major known incidents of companies paying people to post positive review on products either it be comments or major front page reviews on site. Most of the time the reviewer gets paid under the table, an undisclosed amount, which nobody knows. not even the company that operates the site. Now often many major reviewing sites are bought my the actual vendors of the products, so they can mislead people into buying there products or praise. The worst thing about this, is that its very difficult to tell if a review is honest or fake, someone can easily say something is great, but have never even owned it or tried it out, or they can say something is great but it actually is not. That is one of the good/bad things about the Internet, anybody can say anything they want, but in the case of reviews its terrible. I’m a person who always looks at reviews online when I’m about to buy something, usually I can suspect when a review is fake, usually when sites like cnet.com have user comments, I read the main review, then I read the comments, and try to figure out from both, if either one is true or not, its a difficult process, you have to to go with your gut feeling.

One of the most famous companies to be caught writing fake reviews, there are many out there but not caught yet, was Belkin. Belkin paid supposedly 65 cents for a 5 out of 5 review on Amazon. Michael Bayard, a Business Development Representative at Belkin posted on Amazon mechanical turk requesting users to submit their own reviews for Belkin products with 5 stars while down ranking negative reviews. People caught on and he quickly removed his post, but since people take good records, his post was quickly screenshot and here it is.

Here is a news article regarding this. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10145399-92.html

Click on it once, then again on next page to make it larger

So I suggest that everything you read, especially online you make sure you analyse it, and don’t take it to seriously, remember there are a lot of fake reviews online, one of the major sites that contribute to a lot inaccurate information is Wikipedia. I’ve talked to many people that quickly direct me to a Wikipedia article during a debate or for school research. Wikipedia is a unreliable source because anybody, anywhere, can write whatever they want on it. It should be used as a quick reference to confirm something that is already known, not as a accredited encyclopedia.

Just so you know this site tries to stay as unbiased and truthful in all its reviews and Internet articles, there is no money made from them, just from the advertising and that is a very little amount, that helps pay the hosting. The site is here to help.