I
often find myself trying to decide between a number of different products, and
being a smart shopper, I do my online research. I find lots of reviews on
Amazon.com and other retail sites, and wonder if I can really trust the
reviews. How do I know that people aren’t paid to provide reviews? Where can I
go to find unbiased opinions?
Funny you should ask about unbiased
reviews. Ken recently heard a news story about Yelp (a site that provides
reviews and information about businesses). It turns out that there are
accusations that Yelp has been treating business that pay Yelp for advertising
differently than those that don’t. There seems to be proof that for
advertisers, Yelp removes negative reviews and promotes the best reviews to the
top of the list of reviews. For non-advertisers, Yelp seems to be removing
positive reviews, and promoting negative reviews, as a means of “strong-arming”
businesses into paying for advertising. If it’s true, it’s a horrible proof of
the fact that you can’t believe anything you read online; if false, it simply
reiterates the concept that you can’t believe what you read online (in other
words, either way, it seems like you need to be skeptical about everything you
read online).
So where can you turn? Are the
reviews on Amazon unbiased? (We tend to take positive reviews with a grain of
salt, figuring that reviewers got free stuff in trade for good reviews. Bad
reviews on Amazon are slightly more informative, but not completely trustworthy
either.) Probably not. Recently Doug uncovered a means of finding a
self-moderated source of unbiased reviews. This won’t work for every product,
but it turns out that many products receive their support via online forums. On
these support forums, customers can post questions; other customers generally
provide the answers to the questions. You would be amazed at how much
information about the use of a product you’ll find on online support forums!
For example, imagine that you’re
trying to decide whether to purchase a Samsung TV. Searching online, it’s
nearly impossible to find reviews you can trust. On the other hand, check out
the support forums here: http://forums.cnet.com/samsung-forum/. It might take
some digging, but you’ll find all sorts of comments if you have the patience to
read through the messages. For your own searches, look online for the product,
plus the words “Support Forum”.
We have two other suggestions:
First, many product manufacturers provide Twitter feeds that they use for
support. You may find it useful to follow the Twitter feed of the manufacturer
of the product you’re researching, to see what people are asking about it. In
addition, Ken swears by the product review site http://www.thewirecutter.com.
The folks who run the site do amazing research on consumer and electronics
products. Very highly recommended!
Most importantly, always treat any
online reviews with some amount of skepticism. Do the research, and you’ll end
up making more informed purchases.
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