How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.
What's bad (really bad) here, is that not only are the books that are being ranked highly absolute crap, but they are crap in different categories. I.E. A "book" on swift, that was apparently "written", in a few hours, shoved onto Amazon, falsely ranked up - now ranks ahead of a 700 page opus on Perl, in the Perl category.
That's a total fail on Amazon's part, and really, really disappointing.
When it comes to reviews, the correct answer is that every user should have their tastes profiled and compared against the tastes of other users, with only users whose tastes in other areas counting strongly. I could easily imagine that this sort of thing might be difficult for Amazon to implement, though, depending on their infrastructure.
The bogus reviews had one or more of these aspects:
- bad reviews from reviewers with no other reviews
- mentions of the same competing book in my bad reviews
- 5 star ratings of that mentioned competing book (and no other reviews beyond those)
- 1-star reviews of another random book. This one was interesting, there was another book (Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies) that is entirely unrelated. But 2 of the reviewers also gave shitty reviews to that book as well as mine. There's no logical reason that the same people badmouthing my book would have also read, reviewed, and badmouthed that other book (totally different topic) within a few days. So they were clearly hired for a number of books at once.
So yeah, you'd think some of those patterns would be easy to automatically detect. Although I assume it's constantly a game of cat and mouse.