I've taken to keeping a copy of Fakespot[0] open in an incognito browser and regularly submit Amazon URLs to it. Over the past month or so, I've looked at everything from headphones to shampoo and been boggled at the amount of rigging that goes on.
While I can't say for sure that their algorithms are always spot on, they give some interesting feedback in terms of recent review count history, price history, whether Amazon has recently bulk deleted reviews, and some heuristic comment quality ratings. So often I've found that Amazon's Choice is questionable: 4.8 stars, hundreds of reviews within the last 30 days on a slickly packaged, no-name electronics gadget is all too common.
Typically, I use Fakespot to look for red flags, flip back to the reviews area on Amazon, sort them by Most Recent Reviews, and dig around. I don't use the Fakespot Chrome extension, though. Too invasive for my tastes.
While I can't say for sure that their algorithms are always spot on, they give some interesting feedback in terms of recent review count history, price history, whether Amazon has recently bulk deleted reviews, and some heuristic comment quality ratings. So often I've found that Amazon's Choice is questionable: 4.8 stars, hundreds of reviews within the last 30 days on a slickly packaged, no-name electronics gadget is all too common.
Typically, I use Fakespot to look for red flags, flip back to the reviews area on Amazon, sort them by Most Recent Reviews, and dig around. I don't use the Fakespot Chrome extension, though. Too invasive for my tastes.
[0] https://www.fakespot.com