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Make Sure You’re Getting Good Deals by Filtering Out Fake Amazon Reviews

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If you thought online reviews were the easiest way to get honest feedback about whatever product it is that you’re trying to buy, you may want to rethink how you’re curating those reviews — especially when you’re shopping on Amazon. Unfortunately, Amazon’s online shopping system favors the house (aka the manufacturers) when it comes to reviews. There is one trick, however, that’ll make sorting through the weeds to find the flowers a little bit easier: The Review Index.

What is The Review Index?

The Review Index is a web-app designed to help online shoppers buy the perfect gift by doing all of the guesswork for us. Although it’s still in a beta phase, The Review Index Chrome extension already has more than 800 downloads.

How does The Review Index work?

The Review Index web-app is surprisingly simple to navigate. All you have to do is copy the URL of the product in question and paste it into The Review Index search box. Then, the app does the rest. Once your URL is pasted into the box, it will filter out the fake Amazon reviews and summarize the reviews that are helpful.

Step one: Copy the product URL.

Screen Shot Review Index_step one

Step two: Paste URL into The Review Index.

Review Index step two

Step three: Read reviews.

Read Reviews

A quick glance at the red and green bars gives shoppers an idea of how many favorable versus unfavorable reviews there are. And if you’re really shopping hard, you can open two separate windows to compare the reviews of different products. Another great feature? Because old reviews might no longer be relevant to a product, The Review Index will delete any review that is older than two years old. That way, you can be sure you’re basing your shopping decisions off accurate, up-to-date information.

If you’re interested in learning more about how the app works, just click on the “spam test” in the upper right-hand corner. Then, it’s happy shopping — and you know you’ll be picking out stuff that’s buyer-approved. Cheers to that!

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