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ReviewMeta’s Preliminary Reports

May 19th, 2016

In an ideal world, we’d be able to analyze every last piece of data before telling you how the reviews look.  Unfortunately, it takes a massive amount of computing power to process that much data, and we understand that you aren’t always willing to wait a few hours before we give the product a complete look.

We have two levels of reports:  “Preliminary” and “Full”.

You will know if you’re looking at a preliminary report if there’s a warning under the summary:prelim-warning

What’s the difference between Preliminary and Full reports?

The Preliminary report looks at a smaller sample of the data and can be generated in under a minute.  We’re relying on a lot of existing data that’s already in our system, so our user sampling might not be exactly “random”.  Lastly, you can’t change the weighting and recalculate the adjusted rating for products that only have a preliminary report.

How accurate are the Preliminary Reports?

Our goal is to fine-tune our preliminary reports to the point where they are 95% accurate at predicting what the full report will say.  However, that’s currently NOT the case.

As of 11/26/2018, here’s our stats: (we will update as we make progress)

  • When the Preliminary Report says “Pass“, the Full Report will be:
    • Pass 60%
    • Warn 24%
    • Fail 16%
  • When the Preliminary Reports says “Warn“, the Full Report will be:
    • Pass 26%
    • Warn 33%
    • Fail 41%
  • When the Preliminary Report says “Fail“, the Full Report will be:
    • Pass 8%
    • Warn 14%
    • Fail 78%

How can I get a full report?

If a full analysis isn’t ready for the product you’re researching, we can run one in as little as a few hours.  However, in order to know which products are the highest in demand, we look to see if anyone has requested an email notification for that product.  If you enter your email, you’ll be bumping up the priority for that product, and we’ll try to have it completed in a few hours.


One response to “ReviewMeta’s Preliminary Reports”

  1. I went ahead and posted an updated. Numbers have changed, but overall it seems to have roughly the same reliability. The challenge is that there are some technical limitations that make it impossible for the two analyses to always be the same. This is why we recommend that you always put your email in to get the full report, which often shows up in a few minutes.

    One last thing to keep in mind is that both the preliminary report and full report are still estimates. While I believe the full report is more complete, there’s still no way to be sure that a product has fake reviews or not.

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