New university research will give Google the ability to find bogus reviews and automatically take them down, it was reported today.
In a study called, "Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews" which was partially sponsored by a Faculty Google Research Reward (and partially written by Natalie Glance, Google's Tech Lead for Google Shopping) researchers stated that fake reviews are a way to "game the system" on the Internet.
Although labeling individual fake reviews and reviewers is very hard, to our surprise labeling fake reviewer groups is much easier. . . . A novel relation-based model, called GSRank, was presented which can consider relationships among groups, individual reviewers, and products they reviewed to detect spammer groups.