Greg Sterling just posted an article about a plastic surgeon in New York that was recently fined $300K by the Attorney General for posting fake positive reviews on the Internet. It highlights not only how effective and mainstream reviews are becoming but also how it is important that review publishers take steps to advance the technology they use to prevent fake reviews from being published.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and think the best solution is two fold. First some advanced device identification. There is technology that is around at the moment that is mainly used in online fraud detection to identify a particular device ie computer using more than IP address and browser information. A friend of mine works at a company Threat Metrix that employs this technique to prevent credit card fraud and I think an adaptation of this to manage online reviews would work really well. This could particularly work out if the same device that registered or claimed an account is now leaving a review. Or that this same device has already made a review for this particular venue and you can simply take the most recent as the most relevant.
If you combine this with some verification techniques like did the person redeem a voucher, that they paid for with a credit card or did they make a reservation you have some excellent validation point that the user has the right to leave a rating and you can trust it is real.
In a world where so much trust is being placed in reviews and there is also a growing volume of reviews its the publishers that display the moste credible reviews in the future that will garner the most trust from thier users and in tern retain the most traffic.
