Online reviews can be helpful, but the should be treated like — well, any other anonymous anecdotal information. Sometimes a reviewer will not a feature (or flaw) that's not highlighted elsewhere that's important to my decision. Sometimes I just have to make an assessment about how credible a particular outlier is.
While Amazon has some particularly zany reviewers (largely because they have a huge universe of reviews), I do like that they show distribution graphs and let you easily sort, flag as useful, and drill down to the top and bottom reviews.
Why Web Reviewers Make Up Bad Things
Internet reviewers are fond of denouncing products and services they have never bought. Two researchers tackled this well-known but poorly understood phenomenon.
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