Many people enjoy reading reviews of products before they buy them. After all, it's not very fun to go spend money on a product and then get it home and realize it doesn't work very well or it doesn't do what it is supposed to do. There are many places you can go to read product reviews. In fact, one of the most popular is the magazine "Consumer Reports." They've been around for years rating a variety of products.

But now with the internet being as popular as it is, there are literally thousands of "review" websites that judge the effectiveness and value of thousands of products. All one has to do is go to Google and type in the product name and the word "reviews" to find dozens if not hundreds of websites that review it.

But not all review websites are created equal. As you may expect, some give biased reviews in exchange for a commission on product sales. For example, a popular product may actually be worthless, but someone may be likely to tell you it's the greatest product in the world if they make $50 per sale. For this reason, it's important to identify a legit review website from a fake one. Here are some things to look for:

Fake review websites may be poorly designed. After all, if the person is just trying to generate commissions for a ton of worthless products, it's easier to make amateur-looking websites designed to fool uninformed visitors who think "gee I read it online, it must be true!"

Fake review websites will also often have absolutely glowing reviews of the product they're trying to promote. If you read about how a product cured all of someone's problems in only 24 hours, or especially if a person claims to have make thousands of dollars in a week using some secret business method, it's probably not a legit review.

Legit review websites will have reviews from many different people, and some may be good and bad for the same product. Look at Amazon.com, for example. For any popular book, there are bound to be many good reviews and bad reviews. It's unrealistic that everyone in the world would think a product is great, 5 out of 5 stars, A+ 100%.

And finally, it's always a good idea to read reviews from a variety of websites just to get a bigger variety of opinions.