Fake reviews are proliferating, and researchers are developing new ways to identify them
In February, the owner of a home improvement company in Texas posted an advertisement online for “a writer who can write and post 25 positive reviews” on eight popular websites, including Yelp, Google Places, and Citysearch. A man in Chittagong, Bangladesh, won the gig and agreed to do 200 fake write-ups for $100. Within days, rave reviews for the company started popping up online. The business owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says he doesn’t feel bad about the deception. He says clients call all the time extolling his service, but they don’t post reviews.The proliferation of fake reviews is a huge problem for e-commerce and recommendation sites that depend on user ratings. “At the end of the day, if consumers don’t trust the content, then there is no value for anyone,” says Vince Sollitto, a spokesman for the local review site Yelp. It’s not just consumers who become suspicious. British regulators are investigating the complaint by a company representing hoteliers that there are millions of phony reviews on the travel site TripAdvisor (EXPE), which says it’s cooperating. For some products, up to 30 percent of reviews can be fake, says Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Several big tech companies are sponsoring academic research on fake reviews. Liu worked with two researchers at Microsoft (MSFT), which put up $138,000 to study nearly 6 million Amazon.com (AMZN) reviews, among other things. They found many duplicate or near-duplicate reviews—a clear sign of fraud. Within those fake reviews, the team found telltale patterns. Spammers are likelier to post multiple reviews for one product or various products made by a single brand. They write very soon after products launch, and their views often differ sharply from most other users. The fake reviewers aren’t usually longtime members of a site. To expand the research, Liu is working with two engineers from Google (GOOG), which put up $50,000.
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1 comment:
While researching for a paper on Search Engine Optimization last year I found a guy who was a deliberate a-hole to his dissatisfied customers. The reason? The negative reviews gave him a higher ranking and so his business was listed first. For him it was good business practice.
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