Crowdsourced product and service reviews are a great way to gauge how good something is before you buy, but how do you know you aren’t being had? The proliferation of for-pay opinion spamming in recent years has made it difficult to know if a five-star review is actually genuine. Luckily, spammer groups may have gotten a lot easier to spot, thanks to a new study by University of Illinois researchers and partially supported by a Google Faculty Research Award. The study, entitled Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews, aims to uncover opinion spam using a new relation-based algorithm called GSRank Group Spam Rank.

via Google-sponsored research identifies groups of bogus product reviewers | The Verge.