Google Researches How to Find Fake Reviews

By Barbara E. Hernandez

| Tuesday, Apr 17, 2012 | Updated 3:50 PM PDT

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Google Researches How to Find Fake Reviews

REUTERS

An employee rides her bike past a logo next to the main entrance of the Google building in Zurich July 9, 2009. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann

New university research will give Google the ability to find bogus reviews and automatically take them down, it was reported today.

In a study called, "Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews" which was partially sponsored by a Faculty Google Research Reward (and partially written by Natalie Glance, Google's Tech Lead for Google Shopping) researchers stated that fake reviews are a way to "game the system" on the Internet.

Although labeling individual fake reviews and reviewers is very hard, to our surprise labeling fake reviewer groups is much easier. . . . A novel relation-based model, called GSRank, was presented which can consider relationships among groups, individual reviewers, and products they reviewed to detect spammer groups.

The new model of spam detection and has outperformed its competitors in several tests, according to the study.

That's great news for Google, because it means the tech giant can now add that it will take down fake reviews in its marketing materials -- something that will attract businesses already burned by user-generated content on TripAdvisor or Yelp. It also strengthens Google's search engine, by being the one place users can trust not to show a bunch of spam reviews.