Find Product Reviews
Where can I find sources of unbiased reviews (for anything)?
It seems like a large number of review sites, blogs, or store’s review sections are littered with paid advertisements for products or services.
I accept online freelance writing jobs and have to sort through hundreds of offers to write what I consider “fake” product reviews (the people who offer the jobs tell you to go to their product’s website, read about it and then write a review that either you or they post all over the internet.) I consider these jobs to be unethical and will not accept them.
Because of my freelance work, I know of may sites that have biased (paid) reviews.
However, I’d like to find more sites with unbiased product or service reviews (for anything).
Only 2 websites come to mind that have unbiased and non-paid reviews. Are their any others out there?
What you are referring to goes by the name: shilling. Shilling is generally defined as misleading reviews created to sell products or services.
The FTC cracked down on shilling by requiring bloggers and other word-of-mouth style product and service reviews to add mention of the fact that they were paid to write the review. However, widespread ignorance or defiance of this law continues to be the case.
Amazon.com is certainly not a site known for unbiased reviews. It is all too common to find the telltale signs of fake reviews–fortunately, they are more frequently reported or tagged by other reviewers. In the WSJ blog, a story appeared about fake reviews being written on the Amazon site by the product manufacturer’s employees. Appliances (such as the coffee maker in the WSJ story) aren’t the only source of fake reviews, there are many biased reviews of the books on the site.
There are three sites that I know of with unbiased reviews: 1) consumerreports.org, 2) consumerlab.org, and 3) angie’s list.
You have to pay to access the unbiased reviews in each site (the forums on the CU website may contain biased reviews). I guess it’s a case of you get what you pay for.
Morphing Aircraft! Air Hogs SWITCHBLADE product review.
Themocracy