Couple of Changes to the List Page

You may have noticed a few changes to the list page.

The two most important are:

1) the introduction of a "confidence score" which is the default view

2) bringing back the number rankings associated with each item (1, 2, 3, etc.)

The Confidence Score reflects how confident we are that the rating is statistically significant. It takes into account a number of different factors like number of ratings, and the distribution of those ratings. The math is actually pretty complex.

For example, check out the beer page. Under the old view, the default view was dominated by a lot of obscure beers with one five star rating apiece.



With our new Confidence Score, you'll see a lot of beers that you've heard of, ordered by how confident we are in the accuracy of the rating:



We are NOT saying the Bud Light is the fifth best beer in the world. We are simply saying that we have a high degree of confidence that Bud Light's rating of 3.05 is accurate.

The practical effect of introducing the Confidence Score is 1) You won't see an item with one 5 star rating outranking an item with 200 ratings and an average score of 4.33; and 2) Our lists will be a bit harder to game

We've also rolled in a few optimization enhancements that seem to be making the site a bit faster.