
Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book - Ovid
http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html
======
dougmccune
Anything with less than a real critical mass of reviews (less than hundreds)
is way too easy to entirely game on Amazon. I wrote a book quite a few years
ago on a niche tech topic. To be entirely honest, very few people read it. The
positive reviews of the book were almost all from people I knew personally.
Then the 1-star reviews started coming in. Each 1-star review had no actual
content in the review. It was clear that the writers of these BS reviews
hadn't read the book at all, since they didn't mention anything specific
whatsoever. However, each of the 1-star reviews DID manage to mention a
competing book that was "better". And all the bad reviews mentioned the same
exact competing book. It was ridiculously obvious that someone was bashing my
book to push a competing book instead, without any actual substance. At first
I cared, and asked Amazon to remove the reviews, which they did. Then more BS
reviews came back, I had them removed, they came back again, and eventually I
just got tired and stopped caring.

~~~
scrabble
That's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews
and reporting them?

~~~
nine_k
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.

~~~
ghshephard
The good news is that you don't need to read all the books, because many bogus
reviews tend to be written by the same "customers". Simply seeing a
correlation of bad books getting good reviews, would result in those
"customers" losing their ranking power from their reviews.

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.

~~~
otakucode
I don't find it at all surprising, however. Amazon can't even manage a half-
decent search across the products they carry. I have this feeling that
somewhere in Amazon, it has been decreed that the search and the rankings and
everything else must be filtered through the same system that generates
recommendations. You search for "4TB hard drive" and the 8th search result is
a 3TB drive. Their site skips over much more relevant items apparently because
the items are more strongly 'related' in terms of purchase history or browsing
history or something. I expect exactly that kind of system is what is being
gamed in these circumstances.

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.

------
floatingatoll
If you have a few minutes to report the issues with the Perl category to
Amazon, they accept "catalog feedback" through their 24/7 live chat system.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-
us](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us)

#1: Ignore this section, skip to #2.

#2: From the dropdowns, select: "More order issues", "Give Amazon feedback",
"Other feedback topic". In the text box, enter "Catalog feedback".

#3: Click "Chat".

It took me around five minutes to explain that several of the books in the top
100 were incorrectly listed in the Perl category, and they happily accepted
the feedback.

Including a direct link to the Perl category helps them tremendously:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011](http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011)

And I also included a link to the post above.

Edit: Tell them specifically which books, in which top 100 position, are in
the wrong category, so that they know which ones aren't Perl.

------
FilterJoe
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click
it multiple times per week.

Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:

Could this review have been written about any other book in this category
without changing a word?

I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A
mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews,
but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.

Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this
account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person
(perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833](http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833)

All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information
but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the
person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.

I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I
felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review
I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't
helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8](http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8)

However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous
thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing
means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.

~~~
bduerst
Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move.

Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews,
causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may
then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not
if the product is a good buy.

If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work
better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.

~~~
benologist
They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along
with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all,
can't tell.

~~~
FilterJoe
"not helpful" and "looks fake" are not the same. A review can be not helpful
for many reasons, including:

* one or more incorrect facts

* goes on and on about one minor point while ignoring major stuff

* too brief

* reveals spoiler without a warning

Etc.

------
impostervt
Web cache version, since the site is down for me:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-
amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html)

While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that
have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems
to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only
books...

Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.

~~~
dublinben
Do you leave your own review on those books to counteract the unearned rating?

~~~
impostervt
Usually yes, but always. I wish Amazon let you just give a star rating,
instead of requiring you to add a real comment.

~~~
mcguire
I'd prefer it the other way around, actually. Forget the rating, maybe just
give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and require at least a couple of sentences'
worth of review.

It's fairly easy to ignore a bogus review when you look at it, but the star
system makes it too easy to take them at face value.

------
rcthompson
In light of that recent article about computer-generated prose being in many
cases indistinguishable from human-written, I'd say those fake reviews are
likely written by a computer. Notice that they're mostly of the form "I didn't
think I'd be interested in [TOPIC] but [TITLE] was really interesting and
really helped me learn about [TOPIC]."

~~~
Ovid
That's an interesting thought. I'm pretty sure I could write up a nice grammar
to chunk out "interesting" reviews of books. Instead of whining about my book
getting buried by fake reviews, maybe I should chuck it and cache in on said
reviews!

~~~
hurin
There should be very obvious ways to identify "review bots" \- especially
given that reviews are tied to an amazon accounts purchase and browsing
history.

That they don't have an efficient algorithm for this sounds more like they
don't really care and never bothered with it.

~~~
tracker1
I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit
of time and computing power to work through...

Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products with tens of millions of
reviews... correlating that with log history for each review will take a lot
of time... not just to run, but to write any automated process, and work
through resolving it.

It seems to me that Amazon seems to be pretty responsive when bot reviews are
pointed out, and that may be, or at least have been a more effective
strategy... But looking at an article a few days ago regarding twitter bot
nets, and even seeing them try to draw me in... it's a very large problem all
around.

Bad people will do bad things... as will misguided people. The bigger issue is
the false positives... we've all read the horror stories of when a legitimate
domain gets screwed by (insert popular domain registrar here) because of
incorrect reportiong/reaction... or when a business' google apps is offline,
and nobody can be reached at google... it happens.

In the case mentioned in TFA... it's probably prudent to ban the publisher in
question. In others, the case may well be different.

~~~
hurin
> I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit
> of time and computing power to work through...

It is a complex problem - but amazon has a serious advantage over other sites
that have to deal with such issues (i.e. Twitter) - in that they have
significantly more information on each user. I don't think Amazon is short on
computing power either.

Taking into account order and browsing history, product review trends,
linguistic similarities in review posts etc. They should be able to get _very_
low error rates in identification.

Further unlike something like twitter feeds, it's quite possibly to silently
de-prioritize abusive reviewers and associated products. Really, I'm quite
surprised at how bad of a job they are doing - most of these cases are so
blatant and obvious they should not require an author and a live
representative to resolve.

------
doktrin
I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product
reviews. _Obviously fake_ reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only
a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it
ought to be.

It's not reasonable to expect Amazon (or anyone, really) to detect fraudulent
behavior with perfect accuracy. I have to agree with the OP, though, in that
they should be able to do a lot better. Many fake reviews are _blatantly_
fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.

~~~
Ovid
> Many fake reviews are blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a
> relatively naive set of heuristics.

Yes, that's true, but I think this is a question of scale. Amazon is the
world's largest e-commerce site (well, I think they're #2 after Alibaba now)
and I've worked on some of the world's largest sites. Even "trivial" solutions
become much harder at that scale.

------
joelrunyon
I don't think this is unique to Amazon.

I've gotten this on the iTunes app store quite a bit. Low ratings from people
who don't review any other products (or if they do, it looks super spammy).

On top of that, the bad reviews tend to come in bunches (multiple in a day),
are void of any actual useful feedback or complaints and are just vague &
angry (sucks, ripoff, etc).

I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but
it still sucks.

Google Play allows you to reply to reviews (which helps quite a bit as far as
either helping the customer or correcting a misconception). I'm not sure what
Amazon can change on that front.

~~~
mod
Of course in this case, he isn't getting bad reviews on his book. False good
reviews on other books are pushing those "books" ahead of him.

Any type of system to respond would be useless for this particular problem.

------
chdir
Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon
reviews
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614)
.

------
Ovid
OP here.

I really can't say as much as I would like (there's stuff I can't share), but
my publisher had a face-to-face with an Amazon rep and internal action was
taken. Amazon's investigation is apparently over. The internal position seems
to be "we're making money, there are words on pages, so there's no problem
here." Amazon's investigation was short and sweet. Some bogus reviewers were
removed, but Felicity — one of the worst offenders
([http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_c...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp))
— is still there, despite the obvious fact that these are fake reviews. Many
other obviously fake reviews remain. In fact, a new fake book with fake
reviewers showed up. I genuinely do not know if this response is because of a
careless employee or if Amazon discourages employees from shutting down profit
streams.

------
MayanAstronaut
Much like search engines combat black hat SEO, amazon and reviews systems can
do the same.

It would not be to hard too for amazon. Use reviews that are a 'Verified
Purchase' and highly 'helpful' reviews as a training/test set. Then machine
learn a weighting to every review based on the (product, reviewer, other
reviews, etc features...)

The outcome could actually hinder tactics like this for products that game the
system much like how link farms hurt sites they were propping up when Google
figured out how to stop sites from gaming a search engine.

~~~
tracker1
In this case, the positive fake reviews are for verified purchases of ebooks
that are relatively cheap... I'd suggest reviews from accounts more than 2
years old, with over 5 reviews, and more than $500 spent would probably be a
better baseline for training.

------
jplahn
I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I
immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title,
authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are
mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for
review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star
review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negative, it's likely not a
very useful review.

I'm sure there's a lot that could be done with this, but some run of the mill
NLP seems like it could at least help. I'm not sure the plausibility of this
at a large scale, but it seems like an interesting problem nonetheless.

~~~
theVirginian
I would say just include a code inside the box that you can type in to
validate your review as an actual purchaser. Then Amazon could heavily weight
these reviews, at least for products known to be prone to scam reviews.

~~~
obsurveyor
They already have a system for this: "Amazon Verified Purchase" will appear
below the title of a review from someone who bought the book. Of course, they
had to have purchased it from Amazon. They could default to only showing
verified reviews by default or weighting verified reviews higher than
unverified ones. It's too easy to create accounts and reviews to keep letting
this just slide.

------
walterbell
How about writing high-quality responses to the bad reviews? I have seen this
done by some authors and it usually stops the meaningless reviews, since each
additional spam review only creates a new opportunity for the author to
present their marketing perspective via comment.

If this were a novel, economically hostile and unsubstantiated feedback would
be considered economic warfare.

~~~
noobermin
This is a romantic idea, but the obvious problem is that bad computer
generated reviews are cheap and easy to produce, so there are naturally too
many of them for the author to reply to individually.

------
Zigurd
Amazon will delete spam reviews if they are reported. Reviewers and reviews
get meta-reviewed, and poorly meta-reviewed reviews won't appear in the
featured reviews for your book.

BUT that means you still need a critical mass of genuine reviewers who give
your book positive reviews, and for technical books, sometimes that's hard to
come by. One way to do this is to get lots of people reviewing your manuscript
pre-publication. That has lots of other obvious benefits, too.

Reply to reviews, especially if a reader had difficulty with a code example
and you can help them.

------
egonschiele
I used to love reading tech books. Now I am writing a book of my own, and
there are SO many incentives to churn out a low-quality book.

As an author, you make very little: maybe 5% of the cover price. So money is
not an incentive. You are either writing because a. it looks good on your
resume, or b. you really care about this topic and feel like this book should
already exist.

Books are sold based on number of pages, not quality of content. The
publishers know that if your book has 100 more pages, they can tack on another
$5 - $10 to the price. So there's heavy incentive to produce a lot of content.

Readers don't want to buy multiple books: they want the one book that will
cover all of their needs. So they will buy mostly based on the table of
contents.

So if you want to optimize for your own monetary gain, the best book you can
write is one that is big, and has an impressive table of contents, but took
very little time to write. So we end up with books that have a very poor
signal to noise ratio. For example: my book has code samples in Python. A
couple of readers have asked me to write an appendix that shows them how to
set up Python on their computer, play with the REPL, etc. I think this is
totally useless. They can google and get up-to-date information, and the
appendix will be out of date soon. But it is very easy for me to write and
would pages to the book.

So as an author, the best job you can do is pump out a bunch of fluff and then
pay for reviews on amazon. It is really frustrating to see, but that's how the
incentives are set up here.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
You make significantly more than 5% of the cover price if you self-publish.

There isn't much reason to use a publisher, unless its a reputable one who
fronts you an advance and knows how to market your book for increased sales.

~~~
egonschiele
Again, it depends on why you are writing the book. I have heard that you make
$10k on avg if you use a publisher, vs $50k avg if you self-publish. If you
are doing it for the money, self-publishing might be the way to go.

I'm using a publisher because:

\- They have the resources to market the book. The book's not done yet and
I've already sold ~2000 advance copies. I'm trying to reach as many people
with this book as possible, and it would have taken me a lot longer to sell 2k
copies on my own.

\- I'm trying to learn how to write a tech book. My editor is the rare breed
that cares about making a good book, and has 20 years of teaching + writing
experience. I have learned a lot from him.

~~~
Ovid
2000 advance copies? Holy shit! I have the wrong publisher!

(To be fair, they were awesome with me and I had a blast, but damn, 2000
advance copies?)

What's the topic of the book?

~~~
egonschiele
Here's my book: manning.com/bhargava/

It is one of their better selling MEAPs :) I have also put a lot of work into
it. I don't think 2k is typical.

~~~
gyom
I had a look at the sample chapter and I like the way that you're explaining
concepts with sketches.

I've already learned all the material listed in the table of contents, so I
might not get much from reading it, but I wish I had seen that book 15 years
ago.

------
eel
Sometimes review abuse is more subtle than the example in the article given.

I found a recently published technical book on Amazon, which had a couple
dozen five star reviews. I read a few of them, and it seemed great. The
author's biography said he worked at X, a very well-known software company. I
bought a paperback copy, read it, and was disappointed. The book wasn't
terrible, but it wasn't written very well, and did not contain the technical
depth that it appeared it would on the reviews. The book turned out to be
self-published, and the technical editor was the author's boss at X. The other
editors were the author's family members.

I went back and looked at the reviews, and found that many of the five-star
reviewers worked at X, or if I couldn't figure out their employer, they
happened to be located in the same metro area as X's headquarters. One of the
Amazon reviewers is even mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.

I think all the reviewers had good intentions to help their friend and
colleague, but I think it's still misleading, as you cannot expect a someone
to give an impartial public review on their colleague's work.

All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5
star book instead of 5/5.

~~~
tjradcliffe
This is curious, because my g/f (who read the book and liked it) posted a good
review of a novel I wrote and her review was removed because Amazon figured
out she knew me. I have no idea how they did this: we don't live together and
I'm not sure I've ever bought her anything off Amazon, certainly not at her
present address.

So I have the impression that Amazon is pretty good at weeding out good
reviews from people you know, while still being complete rubbish at policing
obvious spam reviews, and doing a terrible job of suppressing reviews from
obvious trolls (my book has a two-star review from a guy who also gave "A Tale
of Two Cities" a two star review, but you wouldn't know that unless you looked
at their review history, and who can be bothered to do that?

As both an author and book-buyer, Amazon's review system is a complete loss.
Every single book I look at has both good and bad reviews with almost no way
to tell if they are based on standards at all relevant to my taste. Any review
that doesn't say something along the lines of "My taste runs to X and this was
a great example of X" or "My taste runs to Y and while this was kinda-Y-like
it failed in these respects" may as well not exist.

------
Procrastes
When I search for "perl" on amazon, I don't see any of the spam books now, so
it looks like the issue is clearing up. Whether that's due to attention from
Amazon or the public, I don't know.

------
FreakyT
Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is
definitely not unique to books.

What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there
exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from
real ones?

~~~
mrbig4545
they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even
go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product,
it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem
to jump on

~~~
awjr
This. This more than anything. Amazon is now in a position not to need reviews
from people that currently own that book. Or better still, there is a point
where there is a verified purchases threshold that triggers the hiding of
unverified votes.

Yes it still means a person can buy the book, then give it a bad review, then
return it, however the effort to do this would be higher AND there would be a
purchase pattern that begins to show itself.

~~~
vhost-
You can easily detect that. If a person buys a lot of books and make a lot of
5 star or 1 star reviews, then returns them, that's clearly abuse and you ban
them.

~~~
jessaustin
Or just wait until they have a lot of books and then reject every return.
Their purchase history would tell a compelling story for the credit card bank.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Amazon will in fact ban you if you have too many returns, or so I understand.

------
matheweis
The problem isn't unique to Amazon. The same thing happens on the App stores.
It really does seem like it's high time something were done about it.

------
castelle
So, here's the thing about Amazon rankings. They're not a meritocracy, and you
might think that good reviews help you and bad reviews hurt you. They do/can!
But it's closer to SEO than that. Amazon ranks things by what sells, and yes,
higher-ranked things sell better, but it's more complicated than just that.
Not everybody finds Perl books by looking in the Perl category. I'm looking at
the third book you highlighted, about PHP. Its sales rank is 38,xxx and yours
is 2xx,xxx (btw, and you may know this - the sales required to move up
rankings increase exponentially, so this difference in ranking translates to
quite a few sales per day). As long as Amazon believes it's about Perl, even
if only tangentially so, it will rank higher in Perl than you because it's
selling better. It's in their interest to market what sells better for them.

I learned this from fiction, but it applies to nonfiction too. First of all,
books are categorized by what you put in the keywords section in KDP, if
they're self-published, or by whatever your publisher put in there if you're
not. Let's say you write a book about Perl and cooking. It may outsell pure
Perl books because more people like cooking than Perl. It might be a great
cooking book but a poor Perl book - or maybe you're lying about the Perl
thing, and it's just a cookbook. But it'll top the Perl category as long as
Amazon believes you that it's about Perl, and among the Perl books, it will
have the highest sales rank.

Unfortunately, what I bet is happening is that this book is legitimately
somewhat about Perl, and the author tagged it as such in the keywords. But its
sales aren't coming from winning the Perl category alone; they're coming from
that and PHP and beginning programming and generally from being ranked in
multiple categories.

Your best bet to get your category back is to try to convince Amazon it's not
about Perl at all. Good luck - I didn't look close enough to see if that's a
reasonable claim or not.

~~~
Ovid
The books aren't about Perl; they're gaming the Amazon system. That being
said, it was interesting when you commented about sales rank. Yeah, they sell
more than I do, but you can frequently buy the for $0.99, when my sells for a
real price. That might make them break even, but since they're (I'm assuming)
self-published, they're probably making far more money overall.

------
downandout
Steps to reproduce:

1) Visit Fiverr [1]

2) Repeat

Sadly, I don't see very many ways to overcome these kinds of review factories.
Maybe Amazon should start doing sting operations on these services.

[1]
[https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&qu...](https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=amazon+reviews&search_in=category&category=5&sub_category=111&page=1&layout=auto)

------
harmonicon
I was recently on Amazon looking to purchase an item. Apparently not a lot
people buy this item online, so there was very few number of reviews.

I got curious if the people reviewing these items are genuine buyers or
otherwise, so I click through to one guy's profile (verified purchase). Turns
out he posted hundreds of one liner reviews for a plethora of esoteric
products(all verified purchase) all on Jan 12, 2015.

They are out there.

------
codezero
There's no point in playing whack-a-mole with the hired reviewers, they should
be punishing the book publishers who are paying for this.

------
tsotha
>why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML,
and PHP?

This is a big problem for more than just niche books. When I tried to find a
new fiction book by browsing categories I found the same books listed in every
major category, i.e. it's difficult to believe the same book ought to be
listed in Sci fi, horror, self help, history, and current events.

------
Osiris
Perhaps Amazon should have two categories of reviews, one category has only
reviews by verified purchasers, people who have bought the book from Amazon,
and the second is all the rest. If there's a huge discrepancy between the
verified reviews and non-verified, then it's obvious that something fishy is
up.

------
bootload
_" why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML,
and PHP?>"_

The other thing I notice is the titles are Kindle. Why are dead-tree products,
arguably a more liberal format, mixed with a e-book products that are
proprietary and closed?

------
cwyers
> Come on, Amazon, you can do a better job!

I'm not sure they can. There are things Amazon seems able to do well, but this
certainly has never been one of them. And I don't know that anyone else at
half Amazon's scale or larger has done much better.

------
codecondo
"...I was intrigue and more interested in playing minecraft knowing different
tips and tricks that can help me to win the game. "

Lol. _chuckle_

------
GoodIntentions
If amazon made it policy to remove any negative comments that steer readers to
competing products I think, on the balance it would help.

------
dukefall
You can use my site (posted on hacker news back in January): www.fakespot.com

It basically analyzes reviews to detect if they are fake or not.

------
argo11
It's happening on MANY products and ruining Amazon credibility.It has become
open and notorious!!!

------
JustSomeNobody
Off topic a bit, but is there a review/rating system that isn't gamable (sp?)
like this?

