The whole idea isn't broken, and it can be fixed pretty cheaply. I think the most fundamental problem is that Amazon hasn't realized that they're operating one of the worlds largest search engines yet. Ditto for other companies that offer results based on finding the best product to match customers "search criteria" (whether the criteria are explicit or not).
If you know how PageRank works, how it was gamed by blackhat SEO's until Google was forced to fix it, and what Google did to fix it, then you already know how to fix product reviews. You just need to recognize that reviews are links, in the sense that a link counts as a vote of "authoritativeness." Since we also have negative reviews we can easily implement TrustRank (or an Amazony version of it) and quickly identify bad "domains" (products or vendors).
I think it could be implemented poorly in a weekend or two with full access to the complete set of review and product data.
If you know how PageRank works, how it was gamed by blackhat SEO's until Google was forced to fix it, and what Google did to fix it, then you already know how to fix product reviews. You just need to recognize that reviews are links, in the sense that a link counts as a vote of "authoritativeness." Since we also have negative reviews we can easily implement TrustRank (or an Amazony version of it) and quickly identify bad "domains" (products or vendors).
I think it could be implemented poorly in a weekend or two with full access to the complete set of review and product data.