If you like to crawl around on the Internet looking for free or low-cost downloadable software, as many people do, no doubt you’ve seen those so-called stamps of approval on some sites: the five stars or five thumbs up or whatever.  You’d think that a five-star rating would mean the software would be pretty good, and in some cases, you’d be wrong.  

Andy Brice, a UK software developer, did a little experiment to see just how dependable those ratings are.  He created a text file containing the words “This software does nothing”, and then renamed it awardmestars.exe.  He packaged it up with a description clearly stating that it does nothing and won’t even run, and then submitted the whole thing to about a thousand software sites.

So far, his useless program has won 16 awards, many of them five stars.  One site even e-mailed him to congratulate him on his "great job", which was "really impressive".

Andy says he thinks that this is because some sites automatically give awards to anything that’s submitted, hoping that whoever wrote the program will put a link to the download site on their site, which will increase traffic and thereby drive up ad revenue.  Which is a shame, because there are download sites which actually do test and properly review the software they get – and scams like this tend to make people cynical overall.  Hopefully Andy’s expose, in which he names names, will put the heat on some of these guys.  

Read more at Andy's AwardMeStars experiment page.