-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email This article was originally published on The Conversation . For the past 20 years, Yelp has been providing a platform for people to share their experiences at businesses ranging from bars to barbershops. According to the company, in that time the platform has published 287 million user reviews of over 600,000 businesses .
There's a reason review sites like Yelp are so popular. No one wants to spend their hard-earned money on a dud product, or fork over cash for a bad meal. So we'll seek advice from strangers and use various clues to judge if a particular review is authentic and reliable.
The very first Yelp review was a four-star review of Kabuki Springs & Spa, published on Oct. 12, 2004. Yelp But sometimes these cues can lead shoppers down the wrong path.
Other times, the reviews are simply fake . I'm a linguist who studies "word of mouth," or what people tell each other about their experiences. Advances in text analysis have allowed researchers like me to detect patterns and draw conclusions from millions of product reviews.
Here are some key findings from research that I and others in my field have conducted: Signs of foul play How can you tell if the review you're reading is sincere? Competition might sometimes push businesses to pay people to compose positive reviews for their products or negative reviews for competitors. Bots can also manufacture fake reviews that sound like they've been written by humans. As a result, fake review.
