Buzzillions Blogs

One of the many hats that I wear as Review Manager at Buzzillions.com is a fedora.  My team makes it our business to detect and sniff at any suspicious reviews that come into our system – and let me tell you, that’s more than a few reviews. Individuals and companies are trying to game the system all the time!

I’ve been kind of quiet on the buzz blog for a while, but I wanted to chime in this week since review sites have been getting so much heat in the news. From the allegations against Yelp, to the Belkin scandal, to the most recent Amazon debacle, the media is looking to find the next shady review site. But they won’t find fodder for their next exposé on buzzillions.com. Not only do we post the good, the bad, and the ugly in our reviews, but we also go to great lengths to ensure that we represent those reviews in a way that is fair and transparent.

One review per-person, per-product

Unlike Yelp which uses an algorithm to suss-out reviews, all of our review quality assurance is done by a team right here in the office. Each day we search for duplicate reviews to take a first pass at the obvious offenders. We then comb through reviews in many different directions looking for unusual reviewer activity. Did we get 50 reviews by the same username in an hour? Did a particular product get 200 1-star reviews in a single day? Unusual behavior like this isn’t a surefire way to spot fraudulent reviews but cases like these raise red flags that prompt us to dive deeper into situation.

The purpose of my detective team is not to stifle user generated content – we certainly don’t want to stop someone writing lots of reviews for products that they own. But we want to uphold the ideal of one review per-person, per-product.

Verified Buyers

Our most powerful tool against review fraud is our Verified Buyer system. Any review that you see on Buzzillions with a Verified Buyer badge was written by someone who has actually bought the product. As a site built on user generated content, it is remarkable that we can take the doubt out of the equation for such a large number of our reviews.  This is also a brilliant way of addressing the issue of the Anonymous Reviewer.  Should people have the right to state their opinions about products and services without having to disclose their identity?  Most reviewers think so. But this is under hot debate from the ones reading reviews to the ones being reviewed: Can you trust an anonymous reviewer? Our Verified Buyer badge grants credibility to our reviews without forcing identity disclosure.

I have to hand it to the big guys like Yelp and Amazon for forging a path through the swamps of user generated content and teaching us how (and how not) to deal with the battles of free speech vs. inflammatory content and anonymity vs. trustworthiness. It’s no easy task.

So in the spirit of Buzzillions, which truly embraces our community of reviewers and all of their opinions (be they funny, edgy, glowing, or coarse), we rely on you, our readers, to help us become a better site. Mark helpful reviews so that the most useful ones stand out from the less constructive ones. And flag any review that appears to be a duplicate so we can whip out our trench coats and magnifying glasses and get on the case.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about a recent article on Thursday in the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Emeryville, Calif,  In the article, owners of businesses who appear on Yelp claim that Yelp salespeople told them they could move bad reviews lower down on the page in exchange for advertising.   The article quotes some managers (some are anonymous) who said no to the offer, only to see their positive reviews mysteriously disappear while their negative ones move up the page.

Yelp swiftly denied participating in such practices, posting a response from their CEO on their site.  They took issue with the East Bay Express citing anonymous sources (no less than five) as well as the accusatory tone of the article.  Friday, the CEO wrote again about other articles backing him up.

Whether or not Yelp has or currently engages in the types of practices cited by the East Bay Express is not clear.  What is clear is that reviews in general – of products, of restaurants, of services, of anything really, are increasingly looked at with a degree of caution, perhaps even doubt.  Where are reviews coming from?  Were people paid to write them?  Can a manufacturer game the system?  While nothing is foolproof, Yelp is partially scrambling because they know, as do we, that when credibility crumbles, so does your business.

As I’ve posted about before (when writing about a recent scandal involving Belkin), Buzzillions employs a number of methods to ensure credibility.  Many of us here at Buzzillions, use both Buzzillions and Yelp, so we are watching this news story unfold, in the hopes it has more to tell us about how to protect our hard earned reputation.

It’s been reported by a number of websites (CrunchGear,  Slashdot) in the past few days that Belkin, maker of audio, video and computer cables, wireless networking devices and similar products has been paying people to write favorable reviews of their products on Amazon.  A Belkin employee used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to pay people .65 cents to write positive reviews and discount negative reviews.   Did writers of the reviews actually have to own the product?  No.  Have used the product?  Again, no.  In fact, looking at the instructions to those willing to lie for .65 cents, fiction was highly encouraged.  “Tell a story of why you bought it and how you are using it.”  A story indeed.  Not only did the instructions include giving products a 100% rating but also encouraged writers to mark other negative reviews as “not helpful”.   Yikes.

This scandal of course caught our eye because here at Buzzillions, we are in the business of product reviews.  Inauthentic product reviews would kill credibility, with our company’s death sure to follow.  It’s particualrly troubling that Belkin, instead of reading honest complaints about their products, and then using those reviews to make product improvements, they instead chose to try and kill the bad reviews.  Surely this is a bad long term strategy.

You may be asking at this point  how Buzzillions can be sure no manufacturers are gaming our system.  While nothing is foolproof, this scandal has been a reminder to us how valuable our “Verified Buyer” system is.  Verified Buyer reviews on Buzzillions, are reviews that have been tagged as being from customers who actually bought the product.  How do we know this?  Our retail partners generally send follow-up emails to purchasers of their products, asking them to write a review.  When customers follow this link in an email, our system knows they actually bought the product and used it.  Imagine that, reviews from people who actually own the product.

Further, we have actual moderators (real live people) looking at every review that passes through our system.  And we are always on the lookout for suspcious reviews (those that might have come from manufacturers or seem to be consistently knocking competitor products.)  While nothing is foolproof, we’re absolutely committed to reviews that are honest and authentic.  It’s unfortunate when a company like Belkin, and by extention, Amazon, tolerates such shady practices.