Review site

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A review site is a website on which people can post reviews for products or services.

Current review sites allow reviews and ratings in three general categories:

Product reviews 
reviews of consumer products, including consumer electronics, appliances, automobiles, books, CD, and wines
Service provider reviews 
reviews of individual professionals, such as teachers, professors, lawyers, accountants, realtors, or doctors
Business reviews 
reviews of premise-based businesses, such as restaurants, childcare facilities, hotels, or apartment buildings

Review sites are generally supported by advertising, a business model that offers slim profit margins and depends on user-submitted content (in this case, reviews and ratings). Business review sites may allow businesses to pay for enhanced listings, which do not affect reviews and ratings on the site. Product review sites may be supported by providing paid links directly to websites that sell the items being reviewed.

Some of the current review sites are direct descendents of RateMyProfessors. Internet entrepreneur John Swapceinski, who created the RateMyProfessors website, formed a new company[1] in March 2005, to build and operate a network of review sites using the RateMyProfessors software and ad-supported business model.

Related sites
ResellerRatings has over 200,000 customer reviews of over 11,000 sellers, and maintains a list of the highest and lowest rated stores. [1] Many websites have become multi-function portals, making categorization difficult; ResellerRatings has started to add product reviews, but has very few. Amazon, although primarily a vendor and marketplace, also offers user reviews, and for many product categories has perhaps the greatest number of such product reviews. On the other hand, Epinions, which started as a review site that rewarded contributors, now offers much lower rewards and has a relatively small number of reviews of new products, becoming more of a shopping comparison site. Other sites, such as RatingParadise are collecting those review sites and rate them.

Contents

[edit] Anonymity

Reviews are generally anonymous, and most review sites have policies that preclude the release of any identifying information without a court order. Review sites act as public forums, and are legally protected from liability for the content by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).

According to Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), anonymity of reviewers is important. "You couldn't have services like ratings sites or Craigslist or message boards or Amazon.com's user feedback or eBay's reviews of sellers without it."[2]

[edit] Criticism

Most review sites make little or no attempt to restrict postings, or to verify the information in the reviews. Critics point out that positive reviews are often written by the businesses or individuals being reviewed, while negative reviews may be written by competitors, disgruntled employees, or anyone with a grudge against the business being reviewed. Furthermore, studies of research methodology have shown that in forums where people are able to post opinions publicly, group polarization often occurs, and the result is very positive comments, very negative comments, and little in between, meaning that those who would have been in the middle are either silent or pulled to one extreme or the other. [3]

[edit] Response to criticism

Operators of most review sites acknowledge that reviews may not be objective, and that ratings may not be statistically valid. A FAQ [4] on the Ratingz Inc websites states that, although the ratings are not statistically valid, “They are a listing of opinions and should be judged as such. However, we often receive emails stating that the ratings are uncannily accurate, especially for businesses with over 100 ratings.”

Bob Nicholson, a co-founder of Ratingz Inc, goes on to state that “If you get useful information from the ratings, great. That's what we hope happens. If you look at a rating and say, `Boy, these were obviously all written by the staff in this guy's office,' then take it for what it's worth.” [5]

[edit] Professional review sites

Aside from sites that enable users to post reviews of products and services, there are also those that work on a "professional" or "expert" basis, commissioning, and paying for, named individuals or bodies with expertise in a particular field to provide their review material. By endeavouring to maintain independence and objectivity and allowing their writers' credentials and site ethos to be scrutinised, such sites avoid many of the criticisms mentioned above that the user-review sites are open to. For example, in the UK the consumer advocacy organisation, the Consumers' Association offers Which?, a site that carries no advertising but covers all manner of products and services, with reviews and ratings often based on exhaustive independent testing. Another site, Productsifter uses professional journalists with specialist knowledge in their given fields to provide its reviews on products, places and services.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Ratingz Inc Provides Online Ratings for Services," March 21, 2005
  2. ^ Sacha Pfeiffer, "Ratings sites flourish behind a veil of anonymity," Boston Globe, September 20, 2006
  3. ^ "Polarization: Planned and Spontaneous," December 3, 2005
  4. ^ Frequently Asked Questions about Review sites
  5. ^ Sacha Pfeiffer, "Ratings sites flourish behind a veil of anonymity," Boston Globe, September 20, 2006

[edit] External links

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