Great Question

Yesterday in my inbox I had a great question from one of our readers and I thought I'd respond publicly because it's an important and excellent question and one many readers probably have.

Looked at the reviews for [company name] because I know the owners. Was stunned to see that the reviewers were almost exclusively relatives and high school buddies. What use is Home Stars if you do not have way of filtering out partial testimony from parties who have a vested interest in the company? It is great to find out that the two sister-in-laws of the owner think his painting is terrific but, without quality control, you are doing your internet customer a disservice.

Without getting into the motivations of the inquirer, the question is valid. The company referred to in the question currently has 19 reviews and a rating of close to 9. There are many good reviews there, but a few not so good. Is every review from a totally disinterested 3rd party? Perhaps not. We do check our reviewers to insure they have a valid email address, and we cross check that people aren't posting multiple reviews on the same company from the same location. Is it a perfect system where we absolutely insure work was done on every review? Perhaps not.

But reviews work because of The Wisdom of Crowds. (and I highly recommend the book) If we have a lot of reviews on a company generally the good companies will fare better than the worse. The author, James Surowiecki, says "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions." I think this is what we provide at HomeStars.

Should we have a place for our users to rate HomeStars? of course. It's on our list of things to do and we'll probably have it out in the next couple months. Lots of other things on the agenda right now.

Posted by Brian
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