Zappos Uses Mechanical Turk To Correct Spelling/Grammar Errors In Reviews... And It Increases Sales
from the fascinating dept
Boing Boing points us to a fantastic story about how Zappos uses Mechanical Turk to fix grammar and spelling mistakes in product reviews. You see, research shows that if a product has well-written reviews, that helps sales -- even when the reviews are negative. The more well-written the reviews, the more people trust them. But, of course, on the internet, you get all sorts of grammatical and spelling errors (I should know, I make both all the time). So, to deal with that, Zappos runs its reviews through Mechanical Turk and lets the "crowd" act as its editor. There's no specific data, but apparently Zappos claims that this resulted in "substantial" revenue improvement, for a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars (across 5 million reviews). The corrections never change the actual intent of the content. They just make sure it's in proper English. I wonder what would happen if we did that for all posts and comments here...Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: grammar, mechanical turk, reviews, spelling
Companies: zappos
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NO ADJECTIVES FOR YOU! COME BACK ONE YEAR! NEXT!
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My guess
My presiction is that darryl's head would finnally (sic) explode after seeing the extensive rewrites of his allways (sic) thotful (sic) expositions. But I digress...
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The first thing I thought of when reading the last sentence of Mike's post was, "Don't do that, then people might actually think Darryl has cognitive reasoning!"
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Editing the reviews to be more trustworthy is fraud.
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Re: Editing the reviews to be more trustworthy is fraud.
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Effect on this site
I wonder if the sight would start to loose readers if are comments got worse.
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The last sentence was a test, and you failed miserably. Especially for only calling out one of the several errors.
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Better idea
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You're welcome. See it's easy to use contractions. Whoops there I go again.
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That's also what I get for trying a different angle.
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I am an Turker
I have also noticed that if anything offers more than a $1.00 to do, it is probably a scam (yes, there are a lot of scams on there for the unsuspecting Turk).
The most fascinating one I have run across is one for a jewelry auction site. You're suppose to go to the site and bid up three actions. If you end up winning, the requester will compensate you up to $20.
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http://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertranslator.html
Oh wait, YouTube already does that...
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Says a company too lazy to figure out how the border works. Heh.
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And we can stop right there, because there is no way to quantify this report's causality AT ALL.
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It will work something like this:
The words 'share' & 'copy' will automatically become 'steal, stolen or theft'.
'Community' becomes 'thieving criminal bastards'
'Fair use' becomes 'child abuse/r'
All negative comments will be permanently changed to:
'The RIAA/MPAA are your family. File sharing hurts your family. You are putting corn farmers out of work and
with the reduction of revenue available for our hand-picked, talent-free (but good looking don't you think? Have you seen that little girl Justin Bieber? Whoa!) Pop superstars - the makers of Autotune are struggling to survive.
Resistance is futile'
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Please define "proper" English?
Southern USA: Y'all listen up.
Upper-Class England: (phonetic) Of course the mawb wouldn't understahnd propeh English.
Cockney: Where 'ave all the aitches gone?
Tech Support: (sing-song) I speak proper english very good, sir.
The world teems with examples.
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I go now...
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