This is a continuation of my previous post on review systems. Having looked at some of things that make your average review system less-than-useful, I started to wonder about how improvements might be made. I completely ignore the problem of dealing with long-form text, so erm… ‘machine-reading’ of actual reviews is outside the scope of this solution.
(updated 2008-01-06). Continue reading
Ranking and rating are activities that are almost entirely subjective by nature. They are based on a (usually unknown) value system. In the case of online review engines, the value system of a reviewer is seldom captured by the systems in question, and the value system of the person querying for reviews / rankings is also usually an unknown.