20 or better

January 27, 2010 9:41 AM

20 or better
On Amazon, a product with one 5 star review is rated higher than a product with 200 reviews and an average 4.5 star rating. Is the product with just one review better? I don't think so, and amazon doesn't let you search for most-reviewed products, so on 20orbetter.com, I only list products that have at least 20 reviews to their name.

Now I'm looking for new features. A full-text search isn't there yet, but is it needed? Let me know!

posted by DreamerFi (7 comments total)

I would say a search is necessary, yes. This is pretty much useless to me in its current state. If it offered the ability to search, at least I couldn't say that.

However, I would probably still rather use the Amazon.com site with all its bells and whistles and just mentally apply some bias against things with too few reviews. In general, I wonder whether it's really worth it to code up a whole site just to do this? Maybe if you also had an option to raise the minimum number of reviews... I dunno, maybe have buttons for 20 - 50 - 100 - 200 reviews or somesuch?
posted by mindwarp at 1:24 AM on January 28, 2010

mindwarp, thank you, that's a good suggestion, I'll do that!
posted by DreamerFi at 9:44 AM on January 28, 2010

it would be nice if such vendors providing a kind of index or rating to score against. Off the top of my head something like this would be nice: score = $median_ave_rating*log($num_ratings)/stdev($array_of_ratings)
posted by mce at 11:31 AM on January 28, 2010

I'm missing both stdev and/or $array of ratings in what I can pull from the amazon API, so that's out, unfortunately...
posted by DreamerFi at 1:26 PM on January 28, 2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_average <> http://www.kobrascorner.com/tech/weighted-bayesian.php
posted by thedaniel at 6:49 PM on January 28, 2010

FWIW, IMDB and BoardGameGeek are two notable sites that use Bayesian averages for their rankings.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 5:22 PM on February 1, 2010

I came in here to mention Bayesian averages too.
posted by tss at 4:26 PM on February 4, 2010