Restaurants across the globe will soon use DNA technology to reassure customers that they are getting what they pay for. In recent years getting “counterfeit” seafood has become a big problem. In 2007 several people became seriously ill from eating illegally imported pufferfish that had been mislabeled as monkfish. From the article: “David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Washington-based Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said he has started discussions with the restaurant industry and seafood suppliers about utilizing the technology as a means of certifying the authenticity of delicacies. ‘When they sell something that’s really expensive, they want the consumer to believe that they’re getting what they’re paying for,’ Schindel told The Associated Press.”
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The new review filter
In the competitive field of food provisioning businesses, restaurant and food store owners know that an alternative is just a click away, so every little tilt of the public opinion expressed in the reviews and ratings could encourage the next restaurant patron to chose their establishment instead of a competitor’s.
Some exalt themselves by anonymously posting laudatory reviews on their own restaurant food pages. Some others have even resorted to offering a refund to diners in exchange for a positive write-up on sites like foodpages.ca. There are even some who post negative reviews on competitor’s sites. And so on..
As the collective wisdom of the crowd displaces traditional advertising, restaurant review sites are being loaded with favorable/unfavorable reviews to reach certain goals.
Fake reviews are the greatest threat to foodpages.ca goals and vision. So we are deploying the latest technological advances to catch the culprits.
As of February 2012, foodpages.ca is deploying the most advanced review monitoring service, which has during our test phase been shown to have a very high success rate in identifying fake reviews due to a number of signals present in both the content and the technical aspects of the review submission process.
A mathematical model to systematically unmask bogus endorsements has been in development for over a year, and now it has finally reached the necessary maturity as a system that will be deployed in the field.
This only goes to show that we take the quality of the review content on our pages very seriously, and will continue to do so.
If you feel that your review of a particular establishment gets unfairly filtered in the process, let us know. We can’t build the best guide to restaurants and food stores in Canada without your help.