Like most web developers, I just love to spend my summer lunch times sitting inside at a computer, doing data mining. I am a bit of a statistics junkie, I love stats, so this is probably the first in a series of statistics-related posts. Hold on, don’t run away just yet!

One of the areas I’ve been looking into is reviews, it’s fascinating what people review sometimes and how they describe the service they get. What I’ve done is gathered all our reviews together and chopped them up into little bits. Then, I’ve counted up all the little similar bits and stuck them back together. In essence, counted the amount of times a word appears. You can probably guess the top words… ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘is’ and ‘to’ are our top five words, but being reviews, I don’t care about the boring common words like this. I’m far more interested in how people describe the businesses they’ve used.

I’ve complied a list of common adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘great’ and ‘terrible’, the words you expect in reviews and compared them against how often they appear. Admittedly, I haven’t factored in phrases, so for example, ‘definitely not good’ would appear as ‘good’ which it isn’t, but I’m sure they will cancel each other out to some extent. So here’s the results…

So c’mon people! Let’s get our dictionaries out and stop using the word ‘good’!