from the New York Times:
In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5
Published: August 19, 2011
In tens of millions of reviews on Web sites like
Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and
Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz.
Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
From left, Claire Cardie, Myle Ott and Jeff Hancock
are among the Cornell University researchers studying fake reviews.
Or so the reviewers say. As online retailers increasingly depend on
reviews as a sales tool, an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung
up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.
“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the
help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum,
Digital Point,
a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A
Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and
would like to make very easy money please respond.”
The boundless demand for positive reviews has made the review system an
arms race of sorts. As more five-star reviews are handed out, even more
five-star reviews are needed. Few want to risk being left behind.
Sandra Parker, a freelance writer who was hired by a review factory this
spring to pump out Amazon reviews for $10 each, said her instructions
were simple. “We were not asked to provide a five-star review, but would
be asked to turn down an assignment if we could not give one,”
said Ms. Parker,
whose brief notices for a dozen memoirs are stuffed with superlatives
like “a must-read” and “a lifetime’s worth of wisdom.”
Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it
is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who
recently published
a paper
about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They
were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon,
Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which
have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.
“The whole system falls apart if made-up reviews are given the same
weight as honest ones,” said one of the researchers, Myle Ott. Among
those seeking out Mr. Ott, a 22-year-old Ph.D. candidate in computer
science, after the study was published was Google, which asked for his
résumé, he said.
Linchi Kwok, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who is
researching social media and the hospitality industry, explained that as
Internet shopping has become more “social,” with customer reviews an
essential part of the sales pitch, marketers are realizing they must
watch over those opinions as much as they manage any other marketing
campaign.
“Everyone’s trying to do something to make themselves look better,” he
said. “Some of them, if they cannot generate authentic reviews, may hire
somebody to do it.”
Web retailers are aware of the widespread mood of celebration among
their reviewers, even if they are reluctant to discuss it. Amazon, like
other review sites, says it has a preponderance of positive reviews
because of a feedback loop: Products with high-star ratings sell more,
so they get more reviews than products with poor ratings.
But they are concerned about the integrity of those reviews. “Any one
review could be someone’s best friend, and it’s impossible to tell that
in every case,” said Russell Dicker, Amazon’s director of community. “We
are continuing to invest in our ability to detect these problems.”
The Cornell researchers tackled what they call deceptive opinion spam by commissioning freelance writers on
Mechanical Turk,
an Amazon-owned marketplace for workers, to produce 400 positive but
fake reviews of Chicago hotels. Then they mixed in 400 positive
TripAdvisor reviews that they believed were genuine, and asked three
human judges to tell them apart. They could not.
“We evolved over 60,000 years by talking to each other face to face,”
said Jeffrey T. Hancock, a Cornell professor of communication and
information science who worked on the project. “Now we’re communicating
in these virtual ways. It feels like it is much harder to pick up clues
about deception.”
So the team developed an algorithm to distinguish fake from real, which
worked about 90 percent of the time. The fakes tended to be a narrative
talking about their experience at the hotel using a lot of superlatives,
but they were not very good on description. Naturally: They had never
been there. Instead, they talked about why they were in Chicago. They
also used words like “I” and “me” more frequently, as if to underline
their own credibility.
How far a business can go to get a good review is a blurry line. A high-end English hotel,
The Cove in Cornwall, was recently accused
in the British media
of soliciting guests to post an “honest but positive review” on
TripAdvisor in exchange for a future discount of 10 percent. Nearly all
the recent reviews of the Cove are glowing except for the one headlined,
“Sadly let down by overhyped reviews.”
The hotel said it was a loyalty scheme that was being misconstrued.
TripAdvisor, though, posted a warning about the Cove’s favorable notices
on its page for the hotel. The site declined to say how often it has
had to post such caveats.
Founded 11 years ago, TripAdvisor never expected to see so many positive
reviews. “We were worried it was going to be a gripe site,” said the
chief executive, Stephen Kaufer. “Who the heck would bother to write a
review except to complain?” Instead, the average of the 50 million
reviews is 3.7 stars out of five, bordering on exceptional but typical
of review sites.
Negative reviews also abound on the Web; they are often posted on restaurant and hotel sites
by business rivals. But as Trevor J. Pinch, a sociologist at Cornell who has just
published a study of Amazon reviewers, said, “There is definitely a bias toward positive comments.”
Mr. Pinch’s interviews with more than a hundred of Amazon’s
highest-ranked reviewers found that only a few ever wrote anything
critical. As one reviewer put it, “I prefer to praise the ones I love,
not damn the ones I did not!”
The fact that just about all the top reviewers in his study said they
got free books and other material from publishers and others soliciting
good notices may have also had something to do with it.
Even if you get a failing grade or two, all is not lost. Dot-coms like
Main Street Hub manage the reputations of small businesses for a fixed fee.
“A courteous response to a negative review can persuade the reviewer to
change their reviews from two to three or four stars,” said Main
Street’s chief executive, Andrew Allison. “That’s one of the highest
victories a local business can aspire to with respect to their critics.”
The result, he said: “It’s like Lake Wobegon. Everyone is above average.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/technology/finding-fake-reviews-online.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper
Yelp. Paid People . Fake Reviews.
Here is some more information regarding the Yelp / Razzberry Lips
story:* Yelp's sales reps use negative postings as a "lead source" to
call the owner and attempt to sell Business Owner Accounts.* I received a
phone call from a sales rep named Summer who stated that negative
reviews could be moved to the bottom of the page and possibly removed in
the future if I purchased a Business Owner Account.* The hypocrisy of
the Yelp founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons is legendary ,
and is further amplified by their removal of my negative "review" of
Yelp on their own website. So
much for , "The voice of the people" or "Real People. Real Reviews" *
Yelp hires paid "Yelpers" $15 / dollars an hour to write reviews because
their business model is not succeeding. The ads for paid Yelpers can be
found on Craigslist in every metro area in the U.S. You could call
this, " Paid People . Fake Reviews".* On Friday July 4th , 2008 , the SF
Chronicle ran an article about how Yelp removes establishments from
Yelp if they complain or expose the Yelp hypocrisy publicly.*
See. Toldja....
GOLLY!
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