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An App to Boil Down Online User Reviews

Posted by timothy on from the please-phrase-your-review-as-free-verse dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."

2 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Okay, now here's a request: by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...is there any way to have it filter out the obvious astroturfers and trolls?

    Seriously, any big-name product or service will have a coterie of fanboys (or paid astroturfers) who will praise something no matter what, and a flock of trolls who will point out everything wrong with it, no matter what.

    ...now how do you filter those out?

    Do that, and it'd be one hell of an advancement in filtering. :)

    /P

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    1. Re:Okay, now here's a request: by Dachannien · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I was going to post something similar. I was apartment shopping earlier this year, and the amount of astroturfing and astrotrolling* was incredible.

      Any filter that decreases the amount of information that I can use to evaluate the "truthiness" of a review is a bad thing. What's more, if filters like this catch on, people will be selling FEO (filter engine optimization) services to game the filters with their astroturf, and then the reviews will become completely useless.

      * In case I just made up a word, what I mean by "astrotrolling" is people who post shit about a product to get people not to buy it because they have a separate axe to grind against the seller. In the case of apartments, it's often poor tenants who tore up the apartment/broke the lease/got evicted and still amazingly expected their security back.