Amazon's "sort by rating" functionality is fundamentally broken. See <a href="http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....</a> for an explanation on how to sort items by ratings in an intuitively good manner. What it does is balance the uncertainty that a low number of ratings implies and the proportion of good ratings.<p>See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855784" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855784</a> for an older comment thread on that article.
The article doesn't spell it out. Here's what you do:<p>- Search on amazon<p>- Filter by 4 stars and up (or whatever)<p>- Choose a sort from the dropdown<p>- Change the sort=XXXXX param to sort=review-count-rank
It’s sad how many big websites get confidence adjustment wrong. A big downside to the workaround proposed here is that it doesn’t re-include those things that have a small number of low scores. If a product on Amazon starts off with a few 1-star scores for bad reasons, that could put it at the bottom of a very long list before it gets a statistically significant number of scores.