BooRah - Inside the Buzz

The New York Times provides an overview of the recent fury last week about Wine Spectator awarding an “Award of Excellence” to a non-existent restaurant. So it appears the “Award of Excellence” is a cozy little sharade where Wine Spectator makes a lot of money ($1M, according to the NYT), and restaurants get a little “boost” to their business from the award — so what’s wrong with that? The only ones harmed in the process are consumers, who perhaps expect the award to mean something more than it actually does, and are disappointed when a dining experience doesn’t live up to their expectations.

So, who should a consumer trust? It raises a broader question about online credibility, reviews, and credentials — not only was Wine Spectator scammed, but the perpetrator (and his friends?) posted fake “reviews” about the restaurant on the restaurant discussion board Chowhound. So, if it’s so easy to game the system about a restaurant’s credentials, what’s a consumer to do?

Each restaurant site has its own methods for ensuring “trustworthiness”, some obviously better than others. At BooRah, we feel there is inherent value in seeing all the perspectives about a restaurant in a single place (even including the restaurants’ own view). This multi-sourced approach means that the inevitable “gaming” that’s being done will be more visible to the consumer. For example, if the same user is posting similar reviews about a restaurant across multiple sites within a few days of each other, that fact will be readily apparent for what it is when the reviews are seen right next to each other. Further, the sheer number of reviews that are collected will tend to “drown out” the outlying activities by a gamer, forcing the amount of effort that’s required to “game the system” to go up — now a gamer has to post reviews across dozens of sites, not just a single site. Of course, any system can be gamed - we see visibility and transparency by aggregation and summarization of content on the Internet playing a very important role in helping to minimize the impact of this gaming.