Same here, but I've always wondered if they manipulate reviews. Obviously, crappy reviews on high margin items and good reviews on a different brand of the same item but with low margins are bad for Amazon. I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe they remove reviews but having 100% honest reviews could be hurting their business. I hope to hell and back they never compromise the integrity of their reviews, but I wonder if it's something they've thought about or are currently doing without our knowledge.
Amazon doesn't have to remove reviews. They can just show the five most productive one's on the product page. Given that for many items Amazon has multiple listings of the same thing, they can just put the one's most to their advantage upfront. Amazon can create (price . review rating) anchor points by ordering the listing on the search results page.
To put it another way, if you're shopping the most relevant result for ten listings of X is the one with the lowest price. That's not however what "sort by revlevance" seems to mean.
Same here, but I've always wondered if they manipulate reviews. Obviously, crappy reviews on high margin items and good reviews on a different brand of the same item but with low margins are bad for Amazon. I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe they remove reviews but having 100% honest reviews could be hurting their business. I hope to hell and back they never compromise the integrity of their reviews, but I wonder if it's something they've thought about or are currently doing without our knowledge.