Searching - Recommendation Systems

When I want to look up information on a product I want to eventually buy, I want to know, and I image most people in the world do as well, if the product is any good. The main tool I use is Amazon's vast customer review database. Amazon carries and distributes thousands of products ranging from college text books to girls gone wild video tapes. Go to Amazon.com and perform a simple search for a water bottle.

You should see a returned list of all items relevant to your search. If a product has ever been purchased before on Amazon, chances are a review or two will be written about that product. Amazon takes all its reviews and displays the average customer review by the means of gold stars. Once you click on the stars, you may begin to read the reviews. You may read some of the best reviews or the worse ones. What I typically like to do is make sure the span of customer reviews is large enough and if there is clearly a dominating review of it being really good or horrible, that's enough for me to make a purchasing decision. In the example below, a water bottle has 461 reviews and 3/4 of all votes ranked it at five stars. There is a very good chance that you won't be disappointed with this product if you were to buy it.

 There are critics everywhere so if I find a product with only a couple reviews and one is either really positive and/or negative, I can't really rely on that being very accurate. It could very well be that vendors rival is simply trying to get a competitive edge on the internet by playing dirty.