Amazon Search Hack: Eliminate products that have 4/5 stars but only few reviews | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Search Hack: Eliminate products that have 4/5 stars but only few reviews

medium.com

21 pointsceyhunkazel12 comments

Amazon's "sort by rating" functionality is fundamentally broken. See http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.... for an explanation on how to sort items by ratings in an intuitively good manner. What it does is balance the uncertainty that a low number of ratings implies and the proportion of good ratings.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855784 for an older comment thread on that article.

Yeah, for a company so big it really bothers me that there are flaws like this still around. Fixing this would be a win for everybody.

The article doesn't spell it out. Here's what you do:

- Search on amazon

- Filter by 4 stars and up (or whatever)

- Choose a sort from the dropdown

- Change the sort=XXXXX param to sort=review-count-rank

Maybe someone could build a greasemonkey script to make it even easier.

That doesn't seem to work for me. http://imgur.com/1iVDjnJ

Because you did not choose a department, which is Electronics in your case. Advanced features only available if you choose a department. Most of the sort options do not work when you choose "All"(department) . if you go to jeviz.com you will see that there is no "most reviews" sort option for all departments, so you can see what is availbale sort options from jeviz.com by selecting a department.

There are more than this in jeviz.com . Each department supports different kind of sort options and it is already in jeviz.com. If you can memorize all options in your head with department combination you can change the sort option from URL.

It’s sad how many big websites get confidence adjustment wrong. A big downside to the workaround proposed here is that it doesn’t re-include those things that have a small number of low scores. If a product on Amazon starts off with a few 1-star scores for bad reasons, that could put it at the bottom of a very long list before it gets a statistically significant number of scores.

One of the links in the article points to jevi.com instead of jeviz.com

Thank you for pointing! I fixed it.

I don't see the "Most Reviews" Sort By option.

In All departments it does not work you need to choose a department. I updated the article according to this.

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