Doing research before a shopping expedition used to mean buying a copy of, say, What Teasmade? and immersing yourself in the opinions of experts. Today, the instinctive step is to go online – but there you’ll find a bewildering array of opinions; for every person recommending a product there’ll be three or four who say that it’s prone to failure and that the manufacturer offers appalling customer service. “I recently bought a flatscreen monitor,” writes David Humphries, “and researching it was gruelling. There’s so much misinformation out there from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.” You can’t really blame the consumers; their opinions are desperately sought by websites that thrive on user feedback. But, as a rule, people are more likely to write about products they don’t like than the ones they do, with restaurants and hotels suffering particularly from customer attacks, as Abi Morris points out. “A perfectly decent French hotel has a poor rating on one site, purely because one customer posted negatively after he broke a toilet seat and fell out with the proprietor. That’s hardly impartial.” As search engines have no ability to discern between a balanced review and a prejudiced, hot-headed rant, the onus falls back on us. Sites such as dooyoo.co.uk and amazon.co.uk try to help by using reputation systems that allow site visitors to rate the opinions of the reviewers; indeed, some sites – including ciao.co.uk and epinions.com – go further, offering cash rewards for reviewers when their work is recommended. Epinions call this their “Web Of Trust” – but detractors have noted that cliques operating within such sites often endorse each others reviews, purely to keep cash rolling in.

“Particularly annoying,” writes Jason Bowes, “are reviews and features that masquerade as consumer opinions, but are actually written by the product manufacturer.” In the battle for the public attention, the cloak of anonymity offered by online reviewing has led to authors giving their own books glowing plaudits, hoteliers recommending their “charming” premises and, notably, Sony being unmasked as the creators of a so-called “sock-puppet blog” or “flog”, that featured a teenage boy desperate to receive a PSP console for Christmas. In print media, adverts that resemble newspaper columns have to be clearly marked “Advertisement”, but online, these low-cost marketing campaigns have started to blur alarmingly into straightforward consumer deception. Fortunately, EU legislators are tackling the problem, and from December 31st this kind of activity may lead to legal action – so, self-promoting entrepreneurs beware. In the meantime, perhaps specialist websites and magazines should be our first port of call, while taking any supposed consumer reviews with just a tiny pinch of salt.