One of the kitchen tools I often find useful is a probe thermometer. You put the probe in the loaf of bread (or cut of meat) in the oven, run the cable it is attached to out the oven door to the main part of the thermometer and can see the internal temperature of what you are baking without opening the oven.
After checking the two I had and trashing the one that didn't work, I decided to order another from Amazon as a backup. A brief search found a model that was substantially less expensive than others. It had 42 reviews—39 gave the product five stars, two gave it two stars, one gave it one star.
Just to play safe, I tried limiting reviews to verified purchases only. There were three--the three lowest. So I ordered a different model. It was a little more expensive, but the positive reviews were real.
Be warned.
Just to play safe, I tried limiting reviews to verified purchases only. There were three--the three lowest. So I ordered a different model. It was a little more expensive, but the positive reviews were real.
Be warned.
10 comments:
You might enjoy this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/27/623990036/episode-850-the-fake-review-hunter
I try not to pay attention to ratings based on less than 100 ratings, and prefer to see 1000 or more. In fact, I wish Amazon had a way to exclude then from the "4 stars or higher" search results! But I also recently found the website fakespot.com that rates the ratings on any given Amazon product --- for the item you linked it gave a "meta rating" of F: https://www.fakespot.com/product/wehome-digital-meat-thermometer-touchscreen-instant-read-meat-thermometer-with-timer-alert-for-for-food-milk-tea-bbq-grill-smokers
Click through the profiles of some of the 5-star reviews. They're very predictable. All their reviews are 5-star, and many are on the same day (like, several reviewers have 4 reviews each, all five stars, and all on August 16 of this year). With all the brains and machine learning at Amazon you'd think they'd be able to spot this more easily. I consider reviews one of the most valuable parts of Amazon, and they must know this. They're risking a lot by letting fake reviews through.
I've virtually given up reviewing stuff on Amazon, because too many of my past reviews (all of things that I'd actually bought) were later deleted, for no reason that I can understand. Why would I waste my time writing a review for which I get no benefit and which later gets deleted? I still find Amazon a convenient place to buy stuff, but its review facility seems to be broken in various ways.
Interesting: this morning there are only three reviews, two two-stars and a one-star, all verified-purchasers -- presumably the ones you saw after filtering. Amazon says the item was first listed only a month and a half ago. I wonder if they were tipped off about fake reviews, or does it just took a while for whatever AI crawler they use to find them?
Thanks for the tip about verified purchasers; I hadn't realized you could filter for that. I will start doing that henceforward. (Of course, somebody like this Wehome company could pay $600 to buy 50 of their own product in order to post the positive reviews as verified purchasers. I'm sure it's a constant arms race.)
I should have thought about filtering for verified purchasers, but did not. Instead, I look at the reviews starting with the one-star reviews and moving upward. The things that are discussed in those reviews usually give me a reliable guide as to whether I want to buy the product or not.
I buy books from Amazon for my Kindle, and a lot of my reviews are for books I read at the library (I am at the bottom quarter of income), so I would not be a verified buyer.
I have recently adopted a policy of only reading one star reviews, presumably they at least are honest. This is because in the summer I bought a book with great reviews that was nevertheless complete hoax: useless content, terrible typesetting, fussy images. Admittedly I should have seen it coming because it was not by a known publisher nor author, but I was tricked by the reviews. However I'm now worried that maybe a skilled review faker will move to level 2 thinking and inject a small number of negative reviews that only comment on irrelevant defects thereby giving the impression the product is otherwise good. Probably the only really reliable strategy is to completely ignore the reviews.
There is also a tool https://www.fakespot.com/ which tries to automatically identity fakes. It does seem to give at least somewhat reasonable results, but not quite good enough, or at least that was my experience when I tried it.
I think one-star ratings are often given for trivial or spiteful reasons, or because the product simply wasn't suited to the customer, who shouldn't have bought it.
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