Amazon has the default "Featured" sort (I'm not sure what is behind this, but it intuitively seems like some combination of popularity + availability + rating). If this default doesn't fit your needs, your only option is to change to sort by "Avg. Customer Review", which gets you a list that is sorted by average rating regardless of the number of reviews. Evan called out nearly 10 years ago in the post that OP's article mentioned - http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating..... The root problem is that one random obscure product with a single 5-star rating out-ranks something with 499 5-star ratings and 1 4-star rating.
I'm often looking for what is the best/highest-quality item in a category, meaning I want not just a high average, but a high average that is statistically meaningful. I'm just surprised Amazon hasn't offered a way to do that (and have read umpteen threads on HN in the past years expressing the same frustration).
I'm often looking for what is the best/highest-quality item in a category, meaning I want not just a high average, but a high average that is statistically meaningful. I'm just surprised Amazon hasn't offered a way to do that (and have read umpteen threads on HN in the past years expressing the same frustration).