{"id":31158,"date":"2020-12-30T16:37:23","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T21:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=31158"},"modified":"2020-12-30T16:37:23","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T21:37:23","slug":"bait-and-switch-amazon-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/30\/bait-and-switch-amazon-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Bait-and-Switch Amazon Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2020\/12\/amazon-still-hasnt-fixed-its-problem-with-bait-and-switch-reviews\/\">Timothy B. Lee<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2020\/12\/amazon-still-hasnt-fixed-its-problem-with-bait-and-switch-reviews\/\"><p>So I went to Amazon.com, searched for &ldquo;children&rsquo;s drone,&rdquo; and sorted by &ldquo;average customer review,&rdquo; figuring the best-reviewed drones were likely to be high quality. They weren&rsquo;t.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>When I sorted the reviews by date, I saw that the most recent reviewers actually <em>had<\/em> bought a drone and they were overwhelmingly <em>not<\/em> giving it five stars. &ldquo;Bought this for my Grandson,&rdquo; a customer wrote on December 26. &ldquo;He played with it for 2 hours before it broke and is no longer working.&rdquo; He gave the drone one star.<\/p><p>But the older reviews were for honey. Apparently, the manufacturer had tricked Amazon into displaying thousands of reviews for an unrelated product below its drone, helping the drone to unfairly rise to the top of Amazon&rsquo;s search results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/06\/amazon-and-fake-books-and-filtered-reviews\/\">Amazon and Fake Books and Filtered Reviews<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/03\/paid-amazon-reviews\/\">Paid Amazon Reviews<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/06\/fakespot-for-amazon-and-yelp-reviews\/\">Fakespot for Amazon and Yelp Reviews<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/16\/spotting-fake-amazon-reviews\/\">Spotting Fake Amazon Reviews<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Timothy B. Lee: So I went to Amazon.com, searched for &ldquo;children&rsquo;s drone,&rdquo; and sorted by &ldquo;average customer review,&rdquo; figuring the best-reviewed drones were likely to be high quality. They weren&rsquo;t.[&#8230;]When I sorted the reviews by date, I saw that the most recent reviewers actually had bought a drone and they were overwhelmingly not giving it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-12-30T21:37:26Z","apple_news_api_id":"0b98cda0-b9c5-423f-8184-811f1899b8bd","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-12-30T21:37:26Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AC5jNoLnFQj-BhIEfGJm4vQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[19,509,96],"class_list":["post-31158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-shopping","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31159,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31158\/revisions\/31159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}