Rhodri Marsden: If I trusted the reviews, I’d never leave the house

Cyberclinic

The internet has taught me many things over the years. Never underestimate the public's enthusiasm for cute animals wearing party hats. Never continue an argument with someone who starts deploying phrases such as "ad hominem" and "straw man". And always treat the opinions of people you don't know with the kind of scepticism you normally reserve for the Loch Ness Monster or the Turin Shroud.

It's impossible to come to rational conclusions about products or services based upon the fearsome screeching you see across the internet. Brutal slaggings of hotels, restaurants or brands or washing machines are routinely dished out by people whose standards seem positively aristocratic. Fawning praise is lavished in those same forums by people who you suspect have been paid to do so, despite that having been illegal in the EU for the past three or four years. The truth, inevitably, lies somewhere in between, but finding that truth is almost impossible.

A friend of mine experienced food poisoning last week after dining in a high-street restaurant chain; afterwards he went online to find out whether he was the only one who'd had this unpleasant experience. Eventually he found some solidarity but, as he admitted to me, he'd have kept looking until his hunch had been backed up. And if you can find any opinion to match your own, what use are online reviews at all?

You can debate their usefulness, but they have substantial power. According to one survey, 69 per cent of us trust online customer reviews as much as personal recommendations by friends; women are more trusting than men, apparently, and the British more trusting than Americans, for some reason. To me, 69 per cent is a staggering statistic. If I gave that kind of credence to the things I read online about items or places, I'd probably err on the side of caution and never buy anything or go anywhere.

We forget that we're individuals; one person's fairytale palace is another person's corrugated iron shed. And it pains me to say it, but we'd do far better to judge things by taking an average of a rating out of 10 by a large number of click-happy website visitors than pay attention to the few who bother to crank out 300 words to air their burning grievances or profound delight. In that sense online reviewing seems fatally flawed – especially if websites, fearful of the kind of legal action that faced TripAdvisor last year from a number of angry hoteliers, start to remove negative reviews and only allow positive ones. Travel is perhaps a unique case, though; it's impossible to road-test a holiday or weekend break, and while we're thus forced to place a certain amount of faith in the opinions of strangers, a survey by Visit Britain showed that we rank their reviews as no more trust-worthy than brochures from travel agents. Which is saying something.

One customer review site, Qype, is having a go at restoring the faith of those of us who take online reviews with a shovelful of salt. It's embarking on a "rigorous audit" of the 2.2m reviews that appear across its 13.5m listings, using computer software to analyse each one for bias and reliability.

Qype was cagey about the mechanics of its software and the kind of things it looks for; perhaps unsurprising, as people will undoubtedly attempt to game the system in the same way that companies try to push themselves up search engine rankings. But essentially it'll be a kind of spam filter, tweaked to spot, say, over-exuberant praise from a Qype member who has only posted that one review.

As well as tackling the menace of misleading reviews, it's hoped that it'll address other issues, such as fake listings for businesses that provide a premium rate contact number but don't exist, and the nemesis of such sites, the "social reputation management" companies, who operate to skew our impression of a company in their client's favour.

Good luck to Qype, but it's unlikely that I'll ever pay much heed to online reviews. Not least the ones of the Qype application that appear on the iTunes store: it's either "fantastic" or "totally unusable". You can take your pick.