that's very true for reviews of products, the classical five stars. Even with comments, they are seldom more than a data point, and stars themselves are given with very different meanings by different people.

So when reviewing reviews, care is needed. Simply picking the product that maximizes stars and number of reviews is a bad metric for the quality of a product, that is, for what your perceived quality of that product will be.

That's why I look at two things: 1) distribution of reviews; if frequency of stars decreases monotonically with star number, it is probably a good product, and I look at 3/4 star reviews for pro and cons; 2) if the distribution has a spike in the 1 or 2 stars, I further investigate to see what the problems are, regardless of number of reviews or how many five star the product has.

So far has worked great on Amazon.