This caught my eye after Steve’s post awhile back about online ratings being useless.

How internet rating systems work, or don’t (NYT article)

Thanks!

Bottom line, ratings are mostly garbage. At best, read them. In my experience, it's often fairly easy to spot fake reviews.

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Bottom line, ratings are mostly garbage. At best, read them. In my experience, it's often fairly easy to spot fake reviews.

Mary Anna agrees with you that ratings are mostly garbage.

I, on the other hand, have had tremedously good luck relying on TripAdvisor reviews (if you read them carefully!). We've stayed at a number of terrific places we never would have found but for TripAdvisor, and the only bad places we've ever stayed at were those for which we didn't look at TripAdvisor ratings.

Yeah, you really have to *read* the reviews, just relying on the number of stars isn't a good idea.

Which, ultimately, means that you have to spend time on things. This is the thing that's making me crazy as we do all these little (or not so little) projects with the new house! Everything feels like a black hole full of information of questionable merit.