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Q: How are products ranked?
Well, the short answer is: it's complicated. The not-exactly-correct but easier to explain answer is this... We get product reviews, usefullness of reviews, sales information, and other metrics which indicate the popularity of a product from a variety of sites. We also have reviews on our own site. We take all of this information, plug into a formula, and out pops the ranking. The product rankings range from 0 to 10; 0 being the absolute worst ranking, and 10 being the absolute best.
Q: How are reviews weighted?
Next to every review is a link to mark the review as either useful or not useful. The weighting of a review is based on the number of times of times that the review has been marked as useful or not useful. A review can only be marked as useful or not useful once by any given user.
Q: Can higher rankings be bought?
No!
Q: Why do I have to sign up for an account to add a review?
One of the ways we attempt to stop fraudulent entries is by only allowing reviews to be entered by registered users.
Q: Why do I have to sign up for an account to mark a review?
One of the ways we attempt to stop fraudulent review weighting is by only allowing reviews to be marked by registered users.
Q: Will I get a bunch of Spam if I sign up for an account?
No. For full details, read the privacy policy and the terms of use agreement.
Q: Do you make use of cookies?
Yes. By using cookies we can make for a much better experience on the eDistiller site. From a practical standpoint, attempting to manage user registration without the use of cookies is nearly impossible. For full details, read the privacy policy and the terms of use agreement.
Q: Do you make use of third-party cookies?
No. For full details, read the privacy policy and the terms of use agreement.
Q: Why do I have to sign up for an account to add a review?
As mentioned in the privacy section, this is one of the methods we employ in an attempt to stop the addition of fraudulent content. In addition, future functionality on the eDistiller site will allow greater control and management of user reviews by the users who enter the reviews. That will be hard to manage if we don't actually know who entered a review.
Q: Why is there a minimum content length for reviews?
To be useful to other users, reviews need to be more than just a ranking. They need to explain the good, the bad, and everything in-between. It's fairly hard to do that in less than 400 words.
Q: Why can't I include HTML in my reviews?
Well, you can enter. We just won't render it. Allowing rendering of user-entered HTML opens the door to all sorts of security-related issues to both our site and to the users of our site. As such, we will never render user-entered HTML. In the future, we may offer an editing widget that allows for certain HTML tags to be applied and rendered when the review is shown. But at this point, that functionallity is still on the drawing board.
Q: My review is edited/gone, what happened?
Your review probably violated some of the content guidelines laid out in the terms of use agreement. Reviews that are removed from the site exist in the database for a period of time. If you notice one of your reviews is gone and you think you have not violated the content guidelines, contact us and let us know the details. Who knows, maybe we took out the wrong review by accident.
Q: Can I edit a review once I create it?
Not at this time. This is a feature that we hope to have in the near future.
Q: Can I see all of my reviews in one place?
Yes. There are two ways to get to the pages that show all of your reviews. First, if you are logged in, there will be a in the header, underneath the text that tells you that you are logged in. Second, find any of your reviews and click on your screen name. In both cases, you'll be taken to a page which summarizes all of your reviews.
Q: Okay, so how does this category tree work?
It's pretty simple. Across the top of the screen (below the logo), we always show your current location in the category tree. Each level of the tree listed is a link so that you can quickly move up levels. When there are further category levels available below your current location, they will be shown on the right-hand side of the screen. You can refine your results further by selecting one of these subcategories. In this manner you can move about the category tree to find the products you want and to refine your results as needed.
Q: My search returned no results, what gives?
There are several possibilities:
Tip: Searching within a category
When you search from the home page, the entire site is searched. If you know the type of product for which you are searching, browse the category tree to that location, perform the search from there and select the Products in this Category search option. Doing so will result in only searching for products within this category. This will narrow the search criteria and provide more relevant results.
Tip: Forcing a search term
When a search is performed for multiple words or terms, the search will return products which contain all of the words (if any exist) as well as products which only contain some of the words. For example, if a search is performed for Nikon D80, any product which contains the phrase Nikon or D80 will be returned in the results. You can use a plus sign (+) in front of a word to require that the results include that term. For example, searching for +Nikon +D80 will only return results that contain the term Nikon and the term D80.
Tip: Excluding a search term
If a search returns results which you wish to ignore, you can update the search to exclude results which contain certain terms by using the minus sign (-) in front of the term. For example, if you are searching for Digital SLR and you really don't like Nikon cameras, you can exclude them from the results by updating the search to be Digital SLR -Nikon. The search results will have products which contain the terms Digital or SLR, but none of the results will contain the term Nikon.
Tip: Searching for a multi-word string
If you wish, you may search for a specific multi-word string by enclosing the string in double quotes ("). For example, searching for Nikon D80 will return any product which contains the phrase Nikon or D80. If you want to search for only products that contain the exact phase Nikon D80, put the phrase in quotes like so: "Nikon D80".
Tip: Searching with wildcards
If you are not certain how a search term is spelled, or if you want to search for several possible endings of a term, an asterisk (*) can be used as a wildcard character at the end (and only at the end) of a search term. For example, searching for vid* will return all products that contain words which begin with vid.
