The Fault in Those Web Site Stars

[Commentary] Having consumers review restaurants, contractors or even doctors is a healthy concept. The problem, as New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, explained, is that some of those online reviews are fakes, written by people who are paid for them. And that, he said, is “worse than old-fashioned false advertising.”

He announced agreements with 19 companies to stop manufacturing fake reviews. The companies also agreed to pay a total of $350,000 in penalties. That is a good start. Still, the Web is a giant universe with whole galaxies of starred reviews, and despite efforts by Yelp and Google and others to filter out the fakers, it is hard to be sure which stars are real. In the end, consumers have to be wary of reviews with lots of exclamation points that sound too good to be true. They probably aren’t.