Online Software "Award" Badges Are Meaningless

Ever go trolling for a freeware or shareware program to convert a file, edit a document, or do some other random task that your current apps can't do? If you've spent any time at all searching for software online, you've likely come across sites that offer certain programs online badges, proudly giving them a five-star rating and assuring you that the application is top-notch. (See the screenshot for some examples.) See if you can guess the punchline: Those awards are, in many cases, wholly meaningless.

Programmer Andy Brice came up with an ingenious experiment to show just how silly these awards really were. He wrote a piece of code that did nothing at all. It was just a text file that said "This software does nothing," and even the description used to submit it to over 1,000 websites online said it did nothing.

With the help of an online submission service, he sent his new app to every shareware hosting service online. Two weeks later, the software was listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites, and rejected by 421 sites. And from 7% of the sites that listed the program, he was informed he had won an award for excellence!

What's going on here? Some pretty scammy stuff, to be honest. Many online shareware sites provide free hosting in order to serve ads against the software they offer for download. The more the merrier, obviously, and quality isn't a genuine concern. They just want to show up in the search engine results near the top. Whether you download the software is irrelevant. Awards are offered to the developers as a perk to get them to link to the download site: The more incoming links they get, the better they do in search rankings. The ratings are meaningless to the end-user, but they stroke the ego of the developer just enough, they hope, in order to merit getting yet another backlink.

The good news is that not all sites are worthless when it comes to ratings, even though a few bad apples are threatening to spoil the bunch. Brice recommends filecart.com, freshmeat, and download-tipp.de. I'd add some of the corporate entities to that list: Download.com is always reliable and offers honest reviews from staff and users, as does Tucows.

As with anything on the web, remember that you often get what you pay for. When you see glowing reviews for virtually every product on offer for download from one site, keep this article in mind and take your business elsewhere.

LINK: The software awards scam