Hacker News Reader

Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's product search is amazingly bad and the user reviews are getting faker over time. To me it's amazingly hard to shop on there. Feels like the engineering team is focused on their many other businesses and ignoring their retail stores.

View on HN

I rarely read reviews there and almost never search in any general way. So, I can't say I've noticed this problem. Usually Amazon is where I go for something specific I already know I want -- I've already heard of it, researched it, and just want it at a decent price and shipped fast. Perhaps others are the same as myself and not really noticing. Google, blogs, aggregate discussion sites, friends, social networks, etc I feel like are where I learn about products - Amazon is just where I pull the trigger.

The fake reviews are really frustrating. I try to work around it by focusing on longer reviews that discuss both pros and cons, but fake review writers are probably getting more sophisticated too. It'd be nice to have separate averages for verified purchasers and real name reviews, since those would at least cost more to rig. One could write a script for that, so long as Amazon doesn't throttle/block you. Sounds like a fun and useful small project.

Right now the practice is for the manufacturer to give people a refund on the product in exchange for their 5 star review. It is infuriating. Amazon should ban these companies from the store or they may lose me as a customer (and I buy nearly everything there.)

It's not so much manufacturers as the sellers of the merchandise. I've had multiple sellers offer full refunds in exchange for better reviews after I left 1,2 or 3 star reviews of some pretty shitty products.

The fact that they haven't implemented a useful ratings sort drives me nuts.

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

I've often thought "Net Promoter Score" counting might work better. Usually a 10 point scale but on 5 point: 5 = +1, 4 = 0, 0-3 = -1, average.

After watching Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, I decided to check out Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard on Amazon. 67% of raters gave it 5 stars.

Is that so strange? The people most likely to buy that book probably already like it before even reading it.

An ordinary person is very unlikely to read it, much less buy it.

You can use google to search amazon. It works pretty well imo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com