I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has so far won 16 different awards and recommendations from software download sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement such as “Great job, we’re really impressed!”. I should be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software, except that the ’software’ doesn’t even run. This is hardly surprising when you consider that it is just a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software contains the description “This program does nothing at all”. The screenshot I submitted (below) was similarly blunt and to the point:
Even the name of the software, “awardmestars”, was a bit of a giveaway. And yet it still won 16 ‘awards’. Here they are:
Some of them look quite impressive, but none of them are worth the electrons it takes to display them.
The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.
This practise is blatantly misleading and dishonest. It makes no distinction between high quality software and any old rubbish that someone was prepared to submit to a download site. The download sites that practise this deceit should be ashamed of themselves. Similarly, any author or company, that displays one of these ‘awards’ is either being naive (at best) or knowingly colluding in the scam (at worst).
My suspicions were first aroused by the number of five star awards I received for my PerfectTablePlan software. When I went to these sites all the other programs on them seemed to have five star awards as well. I also noticed that some of my weaker competitors were proudly displaying pages full of five star awards. I saw very few three or four star awards. Something smelled fishy. Being a scientist by original training, I decided to run a little experiment to see if a completely worthless piece of software would win any awards.
Having seen various recommendations for the rundenko.com submit-everywhere.com submission service on the ASP forums I emailed the owner, Mykola Rudenko, to ask if he could help with my little experiment. To my surprise, he generously agreed to help by submitting “awardmestars” to all 1033 sites on their database, free of charge.
According to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions began “awardmestars” is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the sites that listed the software emailed me that it had won an award (I don’t know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win quite a few more awards yet. Many of the rejections were on the grounds of “The site does not accept products of this genre” (it was listed as a utility) rather than quality grounds.
The truth is that many download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords. Hopefully these bottom-feeders will be put out of business by the continually improving search engines, leaving only the better sites. I think there is still a role for good quality download sites. But there needs to be more emphasis on quality, classification, and additional content (e.g. reviews). Whether it is possible for such a business to be profitable, I don’t know. However, it seems to work in the MacOSX world where the download sites are much fewer in number, but with much higher quality and more user interaction.
Some download site owners did email me to say either “very funny” or “stop wasting my time”. Kudos to them for taking the time to check every submission. I recommend you put their sites high on your list next time you are looking for software:
www.download-tipp.de (German)
This is the response I got from Lothar Jung of download-tipp.de when I showed him a draft of this article:
“The other side for me as a website publisher is that if you do not give each software 5 stars, you don’t get so many back links and some authors are not very pleased with this and your website. When I started download-tipp.de, I wanted to create a site where users can find good software. So I decided the visitor is important, and not the number of backlinks. Only 10% of all programs submitted get the 5 Suns Award.”
Another important issue for download sites is trust. I want to know that the software I am downloading doesn’t contain spyware, trojans or other malware. Some of the download sites have cunningly exploited this by awarding “100% clean” logos. I currently use the Softpedia one on the PerfectTablePlan download page. It shouldn’t be too difficult in principle to scan software for known malware. But now I am beginning to wonder if these 100% clean logos have any more substance than the “five star”awards. The only way to find out for sure would be to submit a download with malware, which would be unethical. If anyone has any information about whether these sites really check for malware, I would be interested to know.
My thanks to submit-everywhere.com for making this experiment possible. I was favourably impressed by the thoroughness of their service. At only $70 I think it is excellent value compared to the time and hassle of trying to do it yourself. I expect to be a paying customer in future.
** Addendum 1 **
This little experiment has been featured on reddit.com, digg.com, slashdot.com, stumbleupon.com and a number of other popular sites and blogs. Consequently there have been hundreds of comments on this blog and on other sites. I am very flattered by the interest. But I also feel like Dr Frankenstein, looking on as my experiment gains a life of its own. If I had known the article was going to be read by so many people I would have taken a bit more time to clarify the following points:
- I have no commercial interest in, or prior relationship with, the three download sites mentioned. I singled them out because I infer from emails received that they have a human-in-the-loop, checking all submissions (or a script that passes the Turing test, which is even more praiseworthy). I offered all three a chance to be quoted in the article. Today I received a similar email from tucows.com, but they were too late to make the article. I don’t know if they read the article before they emailed me.
- I have no commercial interest in, or prior relationship with, the automatic submission service mentioned. I approached them for help, which they generously provided, free of charge.
- The only business mentioned in which I have a commercial interest is my own table planning software, PerfectTablePlan.
** Addendum 2 **
Nicely done Andy. Great report.
You should probably expect a bit of hate mail for a while though from disgruntled site owners.
G’day Andy,
Yep. I think we all secretly suspected this - but kudos for doing the experiment as it shows those suspicions to be founded. As Alan commented you might get some nasty feedback from those pepr’s who are doing this. Ignore them. mISV’s and their potential customers need to know the truth - and hey! They could always consider cleaning up their act (or hauling their collective butts off the internet ).
Scott
I am stunned.. thanks for making this report available Andy.
That’s brilliant! I too have received dozens of awards for a terrible piece of software (by today’s standards) that I released about 10 years ago. It still wins 5-star awards today. I assumed it was some kind of link scam but this experiment proves it.
You evil genius! This is absolutely hilarious.
BTW, I Googled “awardmestars” and gave a rave review on the first site in the results.
Thanks for the info and the nice work Andy, truly a 5-star effort :o)
And yet another hat to wear for the mISV owner (”investigative reporter” anyone?).
Andy, what a hero!
The big question I have though is this: Does the average customer actually fall for products displaying a page full of those awards, or do they smell a scam?
Even PC World is listing your Nothingware.
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,66947-order,1-page,1-c,utilities/description.html
yes it is useless. I also give you a 5-star for you effort.
>expect a bit of hate mail
I don’t really care what dishonest people think of me.
>Does the average customer actually fall for products displaying a page full of those awards
I think the less experienced ones may. It can look quite impressive on a product site. It has the opposite effect on me though.
but it allow me to use the word “award winning software” ..
I did only published 10% of what I got of awards after I came to the same conclusion http://www.inventorybuilder.com/awards.htm
I’ve always wondered how even the legitimate companies assign such a star rating to software. Do they just look for a consistent UI and no obvious bugs? How can an owner of a software download site know that your software is any better then your competitors unless they are planning a wedding? It’s not exactly like reviewing a movie!
I have even had deleted products of mine for which the download and PAD file are no longer available get 5 star awards and certified 100% free of viruses and spyware. Well I suppose if you can’t download it you can’t get infected! I guarantee this won’t happen if you submit your products to my site because I only list those I can actually *sell* (and for which you’ll let me be an affiliate.)
Wow, great report… I honestly didn’t know this stuff goes on, but it’s not all that surprising.
Honestly, I’d be concerned if *any* app had 100%/5 stars across the board. I’m sorry but I have yet to find any app that everyone loves completely. Having a few 3’s and 4’s mixed in there to pull down the average would make it a bit more believable and more like a set of humans scoring these.
Andy, great job! You’ve done the microISV industry a major service and I for one am in your corner. This practice is hurting each and every microISV by fueling the bad opinion many people have about software from microISVs/shareware. Good job!
I really think any microISV reading this post should link to it and condemn these spam directories.
Andy,
I don’t think you quite understand the genius of your accomplishment. It’s no wonder you won the awards - You’ve written the first piece of bug free software. It does exactly what it’s supposed to….Nothing.
Seriously - Very cool experiment.
Why am I only mildly surprised!?
Excellent work. I’ve been wishing for a way to make all such sites disappear from Google search results. In addition to being cheesebag linkwhores as you demonstrate, they also make it much harder to find actual developers’ sites when all you have is the name of an app.
How about submiting a program containing the icar-testvirus. Every virus-scanner detects it although it’s no real virus. It would be really interesting to see how many 100% clean awards you would get for it…
There is an ethical method you can use to test the sites that report “100% clean”.
Submit an eicar test file (http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm), a valid benign executable that is voluntarily detected by many malware software packages.
I practice, this is not very different from the “Best Of Seattle!” (or San Francisco, or New York, or any urban area) “awards” that local weeklies, newspapers, and magazines give out every year. They name 4000 establishments “Best of” and send each a banner, plaque, or certificate; those vain or gullible enough to buy into this scheme proudly hang the honorarium somewhere prominent, giving the issuer free advertising and themselves unearned pats on the back.
>How about submiting a program containing the icar-testvirus.
>Submit an eicar test file
That would show sites that did run scans, but it wouldn’t show which sites don’t run any scan at all (they could just claim not to test for this particular virus).
What would be great is a list of all the sites that actually reject your submission. Those being the legitimate sites. That way we could all promote/reward those operators and avoid the rest.
I think this blog would come off more sincere if you had not provided site names of those you suggest are genuine.
@askbusinesscoach I think that would reduce this experiment to little more than a rant. The usefulness of this article relies on both the positive and negative. It’s also important in our industry to reward the people who have some integrity.
>I think this blog would come off more sincere if you had not provided site names of those you suggest are genuine.
I named (or at least displayed the images of) the guilty. It seemed only fair to praise those that did proper checking. At the time of writing I have no business relationship with any of the 3 named sites or submit-everywhere.com .
@Roche I agree with you. It’s also a way for the author to “apologize” for time those site took to review the “software”
So good of you to create this experiment and report. Whilst software designers are glad of awards to help them along, this clearly separates the real from the pretend. Thank you.
I am happy this happened. Why? Because I am making a top quality download site. It’s nice to see bad download sites take a fall. “Evil Grin”.
Great exposé , Andy! Of course it’s a marketing ploy, but as you showed so well in your experiment, not a very good one. In fact, the proliferation of these awards actually dilutes the meaningfulness of real awards - sad to say.
Customer testimonials are much more effective at selling me on a product. Yes, testimonials might also be faked, but at least you can read between the lines and make an educated guess about their honesty.
Wow! Excellent find, my friend!
Wha? Only 5 stars!?!? You should have used [insert tool name here] to develop it.
You are the Alan Sokal of software!
Absolutely fascinating; in hindsight it’s blatantly obvious, but it truly never crossed my mind that these sights were participating in such horrible deception. Thanks!
Amazing… and disgusting at the same time. Great job.
that’s what I have to say to all the scam promoters: http://www.nchspa.it/
it’s really sad, but it’s really a nice resume of my thoughts.
Excellent experiment and article. Proof once again that awards, like testimonials can be manipulated to say whatever one wants. Unfortunately too many people remain ignorant of these and other more sinister practices and continue to believe what they see. Have you considered submitting your results to the popular press as opposed to letting them find out for themselves?
Great stuff! this is typical of everything on the internet. It’s an advertising nightmare. How can a capatilistic society streamline our digital information into a more organic design? To start, by doing work like this and supporting the real sites that you mentioned.
Genius idea to expose the scammers!
PS I’m guessing this blog post will bring you an absolute truck-load of back-links.
>I’m guessing this blog post will bring you an absolute truck-load of back-links.
Especially when I start handing out 5 star awards for good comments…
As if this is really an expose …
We often submit via Rudenko - it’s a great way to get your software out and “known” about. We get all the awards and in the early days (like four years ago) I thought … WOW … look what everyone thinks. I still keep the awards on the site for posterity but refuse to provide backlinks.
You soon realise that 99% of those download sites are rubbish and create autogenerated pages based on your PAD just so they insert Google Adwords etc.. to make money. However, there is a couple of those sites I do like in addition to the authors: Softpedia and MajorGeeks. They provide something useful like verifying your software is virus/trojan free.
Simply brilliant! It´s really interesting to google awardmestars and check out the promises of the download sites.
Nice job kid. Keep it up.
Hey Andy nice work, I never realised that you were setting out to become the Morgan Spurlock of the software community
absolutly great
> Especially when I start handing out 5 star awards for good comments…
Now there’s a WordPress plug-in just begging to be developed.
Wow - I always knew there was something suspicious about them. I’ve seen the worst software proudly showing they won X award, and I always wondered how they got that.
Nice. I give it 5 Stars! * * * * *
First, congratulations on the success of your post Andy!
It was a fantastic read. Not only that, you confirmed what a lot of us suspected but didn’t test out. That’s why after the first round of awards we stopped posting them ourselves.
However, and even though you’ve definitely proven most of those awards are shams, if you don’t post any you’ll look weak compared to your competition who may be blasting their site with them. Gotta love that perception thing.
Hopefully your article will get enough attention that most people will realize it and we can all move on, away from these virtually useless awards.
PC World now has two 5-star user reviews for ‘awardmestars’. I, er, submitted one of them. So much for PC World as a source of legitimate software reviews:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/userreviews/fid,66947/userreviews.html
yes, I wasn’t surprised by the result …
I would have used promosoft to submit to a lot of websites..
Otherwise, I wonder what’s the purpose of these junkie websites i.e with fake ratings and no user reviews: no one visit them and they just SPAM the web.
There’s spamming, because, as soon as you make a search with google for your submitted software, you find a ton of uninteresting websites…. (no way for someone to gather relevant information about the product).
I prefer at all , to submit manually to a dozen of QUALITY websites and avoid spamming instead of submitting to hundred crappy websites, that provides NO CUSTOMERS at all.
I’m afraid I can only award you 4 7/8 stars for this article.
I reverse engineered a computer system in which the contents of your nothingware are the machine code for a super-powerful stock trading engine. So now your “program” really is a program, kind of like Pinnochio becoming a real boy. You should be proud!
Great effort and service to the web community. Kudos!
Where can I download it?
nicely done sir
Great job exposing these idiots.
Great experiment and really well written results! Definitely caused me to read the other entries in your blog and see that they are also all well written. You just got yourself another subscriber.
Looks like you get another 5 stars:
http://www.getfreesofts.com/soft/819/63296/awardmestars.html
Thanks for taking the time to do this! Gives us some good sites to look at and the heads up on what might be on many other sites.
Appreciate the work!
That’s a great idea, and proves some of my wonderings as well.
Five stars for effort!
I’m surprised SEO spammers haven’t manipulated this to drive traffic to their own sites.
A few hundred links from such sites could help your google juice.
I love this. Very, very clever. It just shows it’s not just the big boys that are scumbag ripoff merchants.
To see how low the banks in the UK can get read this.
http://markgorman.wordpress.com/2007/08/10/what-a-bunch-of-bankers/
eanwhile I’ll link this onto my blog.
Kudos to you for taking the time to do this! I’m also a bit surprised that your program showed up on PCWorld.
>I’m also a bit surprised that your program showed up on PCWorld.
They probably get hundreds of submissions per week, so perhaps it isn’t surprising they don’t check them all. At least they didn’t give it a bogus award - a couple of mischievious PCWorld users have given it good reviews though.
Hey. Absolutely great experiment. Thanks for your huge contribution to the developer world.
I’m not sure if I should laugh cos its funny or be confused because its WTF
Excellent article highlighting an issue that I didn’t even know existed.
Great article, thanks for your time and money making this experiment.
Great article, glad to see someone is finally doing something about this.
Heh, this is awesome. Currently 10300 results on Google for awardmestars, so I suspect that alot of these download sites have multiple domains.
wow
i must publish some articles too
that s the reason i never trust any other site than
download.com or oldversion.com
:))
i have included u r article in my blog
“BSNL DATAONE”
Great initiative to expose the scoundrels.
amazing
How about using Microformat voting to indicate that you’re not actually endorsing the sites that you link to? (http://microformats.org/wiki/votelinks) Basically adding attribute rev=”vote-against” into the A tags. I don’t think many indexing services use it yet, but some might. And it would make sense to formally show that you’re kind of against using the sites that you link to.
Anyway, great experiment! I used to do shareware back in the 90s, until I moved to open source. Back then the ftp servers had at least some back bone with their quality controls.
Will it run on Linux? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Nice report, though.
Shocking. Where are the internet police when you need them?
good effort. thanks for sharing.
Brilliant
BTW - another award to the collection at my link
If you were going to test the virus scanners, the “virus” to send that is recognized by the most scanners (all scanners that I am aware of) is EICAR. You argue that they can submit that their scanner doesn’t detect it. This is true of any given malware. Eicar is an industry standard for testing scanners. http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm
Excellent job, I had always suspected that these awards were totally bogus; but now we have proof. Even better are the ones who put those awards in their print ads!
BUT, the is a problem. Your program is 100% bug free AND it does exactly what you claimed it does. Nothing but generate awards. So, by actually doing nothing, without bugs, it deserves an award. Now if you claimed that it did nothing; but then would defrag your hard drive, organize your emails, wash the dishes, or whatever, then it is doing something it isn’t supposed to do and thus shouldn’t win anything.
Anyway, great job!
well, you are not quite right. your software has right installer, doesn’t crash, so it deserves an award!
SiteAdvisor flags filecart.com:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/filecart.com/downloads/
[not yet documented]
It has been alleged elsewhere that filecart.com lists software that includes QuickSearch Search Bar which is listed here:
http://research.sunbelt-software.com/threatdisplay.aspx?name=QuickSearch%20Search%20Bar&threatid=30816
[/not yet documented]
Nice work on this, Your test “program” was unbelievably blatant, yet it still found those who have forgotten that one should be in business to create real product, not just profit.
The next thing that should be tested is magazine review of new hardware products:
Late last year, I purchased an item for my home network, made by a very well known company. In short, the intent was to buy a product that would drastically reduce the hours I’d need to spend supporting my home network (among other expected benefits), Plugged in, the resident software on the device quickly proved that the trusted magazine reviewers had never even taken the thing out of the box and used it. I’m having to replace the firmware with open source software to get it to do the things promised on the cover. It’s not saving me any time.
Too bad it’s just about the money these days. The Internet badly needs an injection of ethics and principles.
Once again, thank you!
People still use shareware?
thanks from those of us out here that have no clue what this stuff is all about and helping us learn……i am keeping a record of the sites you recommended………..t
Re: John Smith - SiteAdvisor flags filecart.com
We’re aware that SiteAdvisor flagged a few products we had on File Cart several months ago, they were removed immediately, unfortunately SiteAdvisor seems to ‘never’ update their findings despite reporting to them (using their reporting tool) that the products have indeed been removed.
Google should release a similar service, they have the power to keep the information current. McAfee is in way over their head.
For a program that does noting - it does it very well…
smelled fishy — smelting is for iron working. great investigative piece and thank you!
LOL absolutely priceless! As a download listing site webmaster I knew about this years ago, there are a few ‘awards’ that are meaningful but most are just a link exchange tool & eye candy for visitors.
I’m not sure if submit-everywhere submits to my site, they don’t list the sites individually. We’re not a public listing site, we only list true freeware (a free download or free trial is NOT freeware!) & I check every submission myself. We don’t encourage auto-submits but I love the ones with pad file links, there’s more info in there than the author usually wants *me* to know about!
If I’d seen your program submission Lothar I would have emailed you to thank you for giving me a chuckle
I have a suspicion that some of the “100% clean” awards got given out without a great deal of attention to detail, I’ve reported a couple to Softpedia that they shouldn’t have missed. Then again some distributors are sneaky, they submit a program, wait until it’s listed everywhere & then add things to the program but rarely change the website details. Programs hosted / distributed from China or India need extra caution.
Jordan you’re absolutely right about SiteAdvisor & I second your comments on Google & McAfee.
SiteAdvisor user reviews should be taken with a LARGE pinch of salt!
I checked my own site, one ‘reviewer’ reports a “thread” (threat?!?)
“Casalemedia however is a known thread to your system and should be avoided ”
- they’re an ad *agency* - & he then links to a “removal” site which is one of the anti spyware scams!!
I just tried Awardmestars and it really rocks. It was very useful, and well designed. I give it five stars out of five!
Darel Rex Finley
http://alienryderflex.com
Another 5 star award:
http://www.redsofts.com/soft/163/66538/awardmestars.html
I’ve always suspected a lot of those award filled sites to be bogus but without having any evidence to back that up. So thanks for investigating this.
And one more thing………Once you’re getting into the high four-digit range, hasn’t the modifier “Top” long since (around, say, 91 or 92) become meaningless?
http://www.dailysofts.com/category/11/0/125/0.html
“Top 6201-6250 System Utilities Programs”
“but none of them are worth the electrons it takes to display them”
going to be using that one, right there
This is the only software i know of that is absolutely platform independent
If you want to test the anti-malware certification, submit the EICAR standard antivirus test file (http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm). It’s a program that antivirus software will react to as if it were a virus, without actually being a virus.
This doesn’t just happen in the software arena. The certification rackets of some professions work in a similar fasion. Like in the self help industry some guy sets up a fake foundation and his friend sets up another, then they find more people who want to be self help gurus and they all set up an origization. Then the proceede to give each other awards and write copy on the back of thier worthless books. Also works the same way for some activist groups too. One guy sets up his origization, the next guy sets up his. Then they all call each other experts then they say oh I’m an expert reconized by Crap Origiziation A, B, C, D isn’t that impressive? I’m sure it happens in other areas as well.
There is a way to test the “Clean” ratings.
From various sites (mostly antivirus companies) you can get a “Virus Test String”. This is not a virus of anykind, however, it does appear to be a virus to antivirus software. They are used to verify that an antivirus program is working, and it’s alert settings are functioning the way the admin expects.
I’m including a link to EICAR, one type of “Test Virus”.
http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm
I Hope this helps you out.
One thing I did notice going to the Mac is that the d/l sites are much better. Versiontracker, Macupdate, and now (especially) osx.iusesthis.com are great. Of course, they all pale next to the Debian software repositories, but that’s another matter.
Versiontracker has a Windows section; I’m sure you’ll find it’s top notch. And I thought freshmeat is mostly known for free software?
Of course something “smelt fishy.” A smelt is a fish of the family Osmeridae, which might naturally have something of a smell to it.
Anyhow, great experiment, and thanks for going through all the fuss and potential embarrassment to ferret it all out.
I have added an addendum which clarifies a few points. I have also removed a superfluous footnote and corrected the typo “smelt” to “smelled”.
I googled awardmestars as well. The second link was PCWorld. However the page said:
Our apologies for the inconvenience, but the page you requested cannot be found.
You may have followed an old link or mistyped the URL. Please check the spelling and punctuation of the URL, and reload/refresh the page.
Just thought this was funny.
ttyl
Did anyone catch the message at the bottom of the DownloadPipe page? (I know it’s auto-generated, but it’s pretty funny nonetheless.)
Note: Software piracy is theft. Using a awardmestars crack, password, serial number, registration code or key generator is illegal and prevents future development of awardmestars.
So the program does as the documentation says it does? It can be removed/uninstalled cleanly?
What more can one ask of a program?
dude I installed your software and it hosed my system. you suck!
oh yeah soon upgrading from XP so is there a version for Vista? maybe an upgrade path? kthxbye
Awesome experiment! I learned a few things today.
A search for awardmestars produces first page result totals with the following:
750 hits on Google - 4,430 hits on Yahoo - 577 hits on MSN (Live Search) as of 8/17/07 (6:40pm EST). btw, if you want to track this info I recommend http://www.zuula.com (multiple search options).
So I learned:
1. It’s also a great way to weed out some of the less professional software sites
2. It’s a good way to test the search engines. Yahoo says over 4k but will only display 206 sites. Google says 750 but displays 124, etc… A few things can be gleaned from this (how fast DB gets updated, popular sites relating to specific keywords, why search results totals don’t match actual sites available, etc…
3. the service you used kicks some serious butt.
4. Rejection is good thing. I’m sure alot of users would like to see the rejection list or at least your top 20 or so based on this test.
5. Slashdot shows up on Google/Yahoo News for “awardmestars” but none of the sites carrying this info do (at least not yet). MSN News zilch.
6. People love successful Web Experiments
Added you to my Feeds in case you decide to run other experiments, seriously
If you wanna try a simple malware test use this.
http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm
It’s a test file that has a harmless signature that all AV vendors support. Just rename it to whatever and upload it.
***** 5 star article!
http://awardmestars.oryx-digital-ltd.alienpicks.com/
Congrats on another five stars.
Cosmologically, even 1 star has so much potential! So, here you go.. your 1 star, from me…
*
-god
Well done. A great effort. We all can do our bit to make a difference around in our own capacity. And, you have demonstrated it very well by the post. Hmmm, i need to learn a lot!
Thank you. Wishing you success in whatever you do.
The suckers at PC World must have read your blog since this link no longer works
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,66947-order,1-page,1/description.html
But awardmestars was on their site based on this search:
http://www.pcworld.com/search/results?qt=awardmestars#
Downloads
Sorted by Relevance | Date
awardmestars - Utilities
Well, I think I’d like to take this chance, to say something that I believe everyone’s wanted to say.
PWN3D, BIZATCH!
“If anyone has any information about whether these sites really check for malware, I would be interested to know.”
If you get any information on the malware ratings; it would be a great follow up to this posting.
Great post.
Regards.
fake sometimes be usefull
Very informative, makes you think twice about downloading some software. Great find, good experiment.
To Jordan Harding:
It’s been reported that RgGuard reports other, different problems with files on your site. An example cited was
http://www.xptweakmechanic.com/xptweak_mechanic_free.exe
I don’t use RgGuard so I don’t know if has the same tardiness issue that you mentioned SiteAdvisor having.
Yes, we have seen this too
Innocent joke 
Another problem for us is to clean out from our database audio/video/zune converters which are the same software products but has different skins. So please guys do not submit duplicates or same products under different names, we will find them and delete all listings.
http://www.filesland.com - shareware archive webmaster.
More on the subject: our statistics from the last updates show 60% of submitted PAD files is “PAD spam”. So any software archive that does not do manual verification is pretty much useless to the public. Thwrefore submitting CD-ejectors or “free sceensavers with spyware” is unadvisable.
Maybe you got the awards because your programs did what they were supposed to do : Nothing at all :0)
well dude it’s an exellant post
-Lonely Coder-
We have awarded this post our Five Stars Award for excellence in blogging.
Congratulations!
Damn… I’m so disappointed… I got a bunch of those awards after I submitted a minimal screen saver to macupdate (I did not get the award from macupdate, those guys check everything manually)… I also got a “no spyware - safe” sort of award… I hope those don’t work the same way… That would be *really* scary…
forgot to mention I was being sarcastic about “disappointed”…
and there are loads of other awards you have got too for example:
http://www.getfreesofts.com/soft/819/63296/awardmestars.html
http://www.redsofts.com/soft/163/66538/awardmestars.html
http://awardmestars.oryx-digital-ltd.alienpicks.com/
Nice article, but no wonder most awards are worth nothing. I’ve removed them all from my site 2 years ago.
My software runs! but I haven’t received any rewards…
People like shiney things, had a web client once ask me if he could have the w3c compliance logos on his website …
he of course has no idea who w3c are or wtf css even is.
geez, this is amazing but I probably knew it all along.
BTW, got to this site via stumbleupon.
cheers
5/5!
Excellent article. Well done.
I wonder whether website content awards work in the same manner. I’ve always suspected that they do.
I might run a little experiment myself, unless someone already has???
Great work Andy! Just wanted to let you know that we took this opportunity to remind users that we at Softonic download and test every program before giving them a star rating. You can read about it here:
http://www.insidetonic.com/not-all-software-awards-are-serious/
That’s a great experiment. I wish more people can come up with ideas like this. I’m looking forward to your next experiment!
Martin Leblanc
Martin,
Thanks. I’ve just published another article using the stats from this article as a different type of experiment.
Re: John Smith
Thanks for letting me know, those products that rgguard reports were also removed they’re still showing File Cart as a “bad site”.
Thanks for doing this, I had always thought this was the case. I had downloaded some software before that had all kinds of 5 star reviews, and after using it, it had spyware in it and just sucked. I bookmarked the sites you listed and won’t use any of the ones that listed those awards!