UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
bbc.com
bbc.com
I posted the review under her account and did the same checks for my account. It never showed up.
I do not know why it didn't show up, but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam.
Edit: Because some commenters did not seem to get the implied message, what I am actually implying is that in this context, or any context, I don't trust Google. I have no evidence of what commenters said I have claimed. (I have not claimed anything; I just said I wouldn't be surprised.)
Do you have any evidence of this claim? Have you seen businesses be able to do that? Surely, the hundreds of thousands of businesses on Google, one of them has talked about the ability to remove reviews.
That's why I said that "I would not be surprised if..." which doesn't make a concrete claim. To me, it means, "I don't know, but it seems plausible in my limited experience."
I am making no claim other than pure speculation, and I know it.
Edit: typo.
There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. You'd think if it were possible, someone would have written a howto guide. Personally, I'm deeply skeptical that any such mechanism exists. The revenue it would generate would be negligible and the potential for reputation loss significant.
And you used Google search to look for it, right? ...
(Kidding.)
And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...
But if that doesn't work for you, pretend I called it an unsubstantiated implication instead. Either way, I think we all understood what the OP meant, and we all understood what I meant in my response. So at least we are communicating.
I'll let you decide if that implication is unsubstantiated or not.
Today you go out and there's a pigeon sitting on the branch over your car, you scare it away.
Your friend is like "what did you do that for, you have no evidence this pigeon poops on cars!".
Your [asdfasgasdgasdg] position is "this pigeon might be fine" the OP's position appears to be [or at least, mine is] "pigeons are probably going to poop on my car". You're saying his position is insubstantiated ...
It's the difference between treating Google as unique, and treating them as a member of a class of businesses. It's not insubstantiated, it's just a different form of substantiation. If all advertising businesses the OP has dealt with before were underhanded then your position looks to them like "today is unique, maybe the sun won't rise".
tl;dr you can substantiate a position based on general behaviours of items in a class, it's not necessarily wrong, and can be just a different model.
In theory a review hoster is supposed to evaluate claims and act on reasonable ones. In practice review hosters are terrified of getting sued and will take down reviews easily.
I suspect most local businesses hire "reputation fixing" firms to actually do this dirty work for them.
Aside: somehow businesses get moved - even major ones like a local McDo got moved to the wrong location. Takes weeks for corrections from when I report them. I really can't understand that one. This too could be a killer for a small business, getting shifted to the wrong location.
In a similar vein, I'm forever having to report our opening hours and things to Facebook as we don't have any (small craft shop, open by arrangement) and people insist on adding some.
It's all really weirdly handled. I suppose it's the presence of untrustworthy parties in such disclosures though Google should have enough trust signals to weight users input.
I wish Google would be terrified of getting sued, but we both know this is not gonna happen.
My friend is a business owner.
She received couple one-star reviews on google maps from customers she never had (she’s a real estate developer, real estate is expensive, she doesn’t have many customers).
Wasn’t able to do anything about them.
In any case, the scenario you're describing is decidedly not pay-for-play on Google's part, and thus doesn't really impinge on my response to OP.
I'll assume Google's reviews are at least somewhat likely to be biased (either way!) until reason to believe otherwise. The "you don't know the review wasn't posted by a dog" position.
Reviews can be removed if they are shown to violate Google policies. Also, legal action can be taken to remove a review. Google does not write law about what reviews are permanent.
Someone has given a credible mechanism for take down, report it as fraudulent. I find it highly likely that if you have a paying B2B relationship - eg you're a high paying advertising client, that you'd be able to report "frauds" and get immediate action.
But if course I've wouldn't know, and presumably Google would have NDAs for businesses in any special access (it would also be detrimental to the business to disclose it and risk losing the special access).
All we've really got is our TrustRank RTM on our part experiences with Google and similar corps.
Given how well known other unscrupulous review service tactics are (eg, yelp) I doubt this would be the case. It's hard to keep such practices secret when they involve attempting to extract money from a large number of businesses. Plus Google seems to be reasonably honest about labeling (even if very subtly) when things are sponsored ads or not.
I would find it far more likely that this is simply a symptom of something Google is well known for doing: Content moderation through algorithms/ML which mostly works but still messes up a lot. Either the wording of the review hit some metric on its own, or the business already was detected as being review bombed and your review got caught in the cleanup crossfire. Posting it twice probably didn't help, as that would further convince an algorithm it's probably not legitimate.
I intentionally did not make a concrete claim.
I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.
It obviously was intentional to lie to the user. We're just discussing the line at which intentional lies for selfish reasons can be called malicious.
Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?
They aren't like baby killers or anything, but they are certainly prioritizing their wallet over your consumer good and even safety.
Imagine if HN charged to post and shadow-banned users.
Google drops reviews for a few known reasons. When a location gets negative coverage in the news, thousands of negative reviews from people who have never visited the location. Google then drops the reviews since review bombing is not useful.
Who knows why OPs comment was flagged, but its easy to see how this happens without a big conspiracy going on.
When motive, money and power align,yet we still accept weak ass excuses?
"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."
I'm not sure what makes Google so different that it should be exempt from general trends around reviews. Businesses have their interest aligned here: removing negative reviews and faking positive reviews are beneficial to each individually, and can't be directly weaponized against competition. Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest; regular users will not replace Google Maps with OSM over a review issue, while a business might want to stop paying Google if they get bad experience on the marketing front.
Have you actually thought about this at all? Why on earth would ANYONE bother reading reviews that they know to be categorically fraudulent? Without keeping the reviews honest, at least to a degree that the general public considers them honest and legitimate, Google Maps Reviews becomes worthless and a dead product. Fake reviews are a very real threat to their product's value and Google arguably has very good strong incentives to keep reviews honest so people keep using them.
It's because most people don't pay attention and didn't figure out yet that on-line reviews in general are worthless, thoroughly gamed bullshit. Those who did figure it out - they don't stop using Yelp/Glassdoor/Amazon/eBay/Google Maps anyway, because those services still offer enough value to customers compensate for broken reviews.
So if regular users will be there either way, and manipulating reviews - or allowing them to be easily manipulated - increases retention of paying customers (businesses), which way the incentives blow?
--
I went to Rotterdam again 1 year ago. My review was still there. A half-baked apology was under my comment. I walked by, no cars were blocking the ramps. I call that a win.
Basically, it's just me and the owner of the business that sees the review. The negative review I gave the scammy business doesn't show up when I sign out.
What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.
However, you could still be right.
While working for a big vacation rental company in Portland not named Airbnb, they rolled out a review update that still added negative reviews to the 5 star score, but hid the context.
A rental may have a lowered star rating but the only story you’d see was praise.
Business is not about logic like engineering. It’s about growing margins, and that is entirely emotional.
Google consistently has bad/non existent customer service
It is famously hard to talk to a google employee when you have a problem
Google has a history of primarily hiring devs
Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results
Google probably has the largest most experienced anti-SEO team on the earth
Google seems to want to stay out of the press
Google maps reviews are a very major competitive moat against other maps
Google is supported by ads, but AFAIK does not actively seek customers
Google does not do delivery
Google's money maker is getting information, maps is a major input
Maps is a secondary business able to be subsidized by search ad revenue
Inflated reviews/advantaged reviews would make ad customers happy
Selling position is potentially extremely profitable
What I wouldn't be surprised by is google systemically limiting negative reviews. In my experience A yelp 3.5 would be a 4 on google maps. A yelp 1 or 2 would be a 3 on google maps. 4 would be 4.5 on google maps. Google maps numbers are definitely inflated, but once you understand the relative scale it's just as good as pre-corrupt Yelp.
Just because something is not in the best interest of Google overall or long term down not mean a small fiefdom is doing something different for their own self interest, even if only temporarily until it is eventually discovered and corrected.
For example, almost all your statements about Google above are incorrect for at least one business they've been involved for, for at least part of the time they've been in it. Often it's easy for find multiple counter examples.
As a whole, Google follows those statements you made, but for any specific business they are in I wouldn't make a blind wager about it.
Google's bread and butter is controlling the stream of data so that people accept its results are legitimate. That's not quite the same thing. Essentially Google does well when people trust Google implicitly and don't question whether or not its results are actually good. For a very long time Google returned W3Schools as the top result for most HTML and CSS queries. These days MDN is top and W3Schools is second. W3Schools is not the second most relevant link for a search of a CSS property name or an HTML tag. I do wonder if they're second because they display a prominent Google AdSense ad at the top of every page.
The main thing about Google Search results is that they're much better than their competition. That's all you can really say for them though. The results aren't anywhere near as good as they were 15 years ago, where a query genuinely returned the best, most relevant results. You could predict which site would be top for a query domain you knew well. Google are still dining out on that reputation but they don't really deserve it any more.
In order to remove a review on Google Business it needs to be fraudulent or outdated - e.g. the business has been remodeled and the review doesn't apply anymore. But the list has over 10 different categories on why a review can be removed. So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review. The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.
Yes. This is an understanding I buy:
Algorithmic/Systemic upward review pressure: easily removed/prevented reviews.
Alignment problem: money comes from business, not user.
>> So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review
No, it is possible to get something removed if it violates Googles policies that are designed to make sure reviews are on topic and legitimate.
>> The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.
Not true at all. I have personally told many clients who spent XXX million dollars with Google that reviews can not be touched if they follow Google policies. The customer is not the business, it is the users who trust these reviews. Google can do just fine without monetizing the reviews but will not survive without user trust. It will take 2 hours to become a global headline if Google did something like this. And if this was true no business would every have bad reviews.
Suppose you left Google for a google-affiliated Reputation agency, then your disclaimer would be correct, but your comments might be fishy. No way to know. In a general sense I wonder how many of such agencies operate on HN to give positive twists to discussions that may hurt brand image.
My feeling is that google have paid only lip service to that for more than a decade now? Ads are now much, much more important due to lack of meaningful search competition.
Remember ads used to be clearly separate from search results? That's a long time ago. Google make a load of money selling $company the first hit for the search string with $company_name which is an ad so $company_competition can't steal their search result. Then take the cash when the person searching for $company clicks the first link that comes up when they search for company. That's closer to protection rackets and stand-over tactics than focus on a bread-and-butter of legit search results.
That's just one example of modern google. Remember "I'm feeling lucky?" Quite the contrast nowadays isn't it. Unrecognizably different in the google approach. But also it's difficult to take a legitimate result focus seriously if you've ever done a google search on a phone. Try it.
Google are really happy to get any bidding war for advertising content going and have such a dominant position they don't care at all what you think about it. This particular suggestion of what they might be doing? I dunno. It'll probably leak if it's true. It is completely and totally consistent with modern google.
(1) Anyone can easily see why you're banned, if they want to turn 'showdead' on in their profile and look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski ;
(2) Anyone can easily get an answer about why they're banned on HN, simply by asking us;
(3) Anyone can easily get themselves unbanned on HN if they want to use the site in the intended spirit as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I doubt google is investigating each bad review they receive, though, so it happening to both accounts is odd.
1) You posted a review which presumably got flagged as being spam/low-quality (maybe an automated system flagged it for having ALL CAPS or curse words, or who knows what).
2) You posted the same review on a different account, which now is flagged as double spam because now it looks like you are operating a sock-puppet account.
I think my version of events sounds a lot more likely than yours. If your thing was true, then you could sign up right now with your own fake business and find the page where you can remove reviews of your own business. Since no one has shown this to happen, one can only assume that it doesn't happen.
I think Google/Amazon etc try to mostly remove fake reviews, and that probably just catches reviewers who are giving 1 star angry-rants as "spam".
Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?
You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible.
If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess.
Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.
What I really meant is that I don't trust Google in this situation. That lack of trust still exists and is not a conspiracy.
And I _would_ be surprised if Google actually did the right thing here.
I would be really surprised, as such a scheme existing without being exposed by now seems highly unlikely, and it would completely undermine the value of Google Maps reviews once everyone knows businesses can freely curate their reviews. Why would you bother looking up reviews for a business if you already knew any legitimate negative ones would be censored out? You wouldn't. Nobody would. Reviews on Google Maps would be discontinued by now if it were ever the case.
Anyway - no customer gave us any review on google and our website is full of recommendation letters. But at some point google started nagging our employees to put reviews since they visited our office.
Guess what happened. We got our first review from an employee we were not happy with and planned to gracefully close our cooperation with.
This is against Google policy. So we complained. We had to spend significant time to get to a real person at Google and get this removed.
After a year similar situation happened. I thought ok - this should be easy the second time. No way - this time all the emails we knew did not respond, we could not reach anybody. We flagged the review several times. We could not do anything about that.
It is like a person can just put a shit on your office wall and you could not clean it. And shit owner - Google doesn't care.
We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. The company that provided this service was a Google partner. They explained that 80-90% of reviews of everything is written for money.
And the best thing - once we started getting our reviews, the flagged reviews were finally removed. Seems like AI decided the we are a good company.
Do you think we did something wrong? Immoral? Or just played business on a not leveled field?
And to summarize. I do not care about reviews. And we have money to fight back with lawyers or PR. But it is sad that some businesses don't have this option and somebody (Google) can harm them through reviews they did not ask for.
I read about a case of (I think it was) a hair salon owner where Facebook automatically created a Facebook business page for them. They sued and they were forced to delete it.
But my business never had anything to do with Google, so I never signed any T&Cs
At this point TCs of megacorps are basically creating a parallel legal system
Because well, that seems like misrepresentation, or straight up fraud.
But publishing reviews of your business sounds well within the bounds of freedom of speech.
Pretending that the page hosting those reviews is affiliated with you, probably not legal unless you have agreed to it.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up "disavowing" the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can't set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.
That should be Google's problem, if it wasn't above the law.
(Which country/industry?)
I like the fact that there's a third party controlling reviews, not the company itself. We all know how legit those Testimonials on websites are... I agree that it can have a bad effect, fake reviews are bad, but better than only fake reviews hosted by the company they're about.
Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .
There are some legitimate uses to proxy through residential IPs, but I wonder what percentage of traffic through luminati is legitimate. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a single digit percentage.
Then, as a sibling comment pointed out, you just pay to get obviously fake mass positive reviews for a competitor, and suddenly they have a null rating because the market has removed all the reviews.
I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do this.
Outcompeted by another product listing? Buy obviously fake amazon reviews and they would get suspended by Amazon for purchasing fake reviews.
I've heard that Amazon is now more nuanced in how they handle suspensions, but it's a mess.
Like if you want to boost your product with 1,000 fake reviews then you need 1,000 accounts that don't look like bots. Meaning they need to do a lot of different activities so they have a behavior pattern that looks like a real person. Which would include posting other fake reviews.
Of course in Amazon's case they could just require accounts to have purchased the item in question on Amazon to review it. But they must prefer more reviews to making it harder to manipulate reviews using bots.
These users have years of real account history and they really did buy the product. Its just on an external service, the seller refunds the money.
It makes it harder to detect that they're fake. For the same reason bots will try to friend random people on Facebook, follow random accounts on Instagram, etc...
We know this and its not as far fetched as people might think - happens very frequently. The systems are designed to handle this appropriately. Fun to see how people try to game the system though :)
The problem some ten-ish years ago were bogus computer-generated reviews. But now the bogus reviews are written by humans and are smart enough to sound balanced.
I don't know what to do. But for now, I subscribe to Consumer Reports and use price as a proxy for quality.
Being a witness to all of this, I no longer trust any particular review. At this point, I strongly prefer to spend a little bit more money, and buy a product straight from a recognizable and reputable brand name.
Google traffic isn't a big priority for me anymore but it's sad to think of the waste of time and research on the consumer side, too, especially for consumers looking only at those stars.
The pivoting is fine and I can see that it is annoying when your early adopters "cripple" the launch of your all new app with a sub 2 star rating. But imo it was justified in this case because where the old app was super stable and fast, the new app was littered with bugs and features became much more difficult to find.
In some platforms I am happy with everything, leaving a 4, getting the follow up question “what went wrong?”
Nothing went wrong, they still exceeded expectations but I reserve my 5s for those “once in a year, best in class” experiences. I refuse to shift my MO to “less than 4 means something was bad”.
The scale he uses makes sense and honestly due to the boatloads of useless (or fake) reviews i'm much more likely to take anything below 5 seriously or look at em quicker because it's there that I expect people that properly point out how it was good but what could be better at like a 4 (perfection is rare) and how the service or product failed them at like a 1 or 2. (Tho I take into account that there's always shitheads and karens)
I gave up on a linear system of rating long time ago. While seemingly technically correct, it never made total sense in real world—and makes less and less of it as customer bases become more diverse.
There are countless individual preferences, weighed arbitrarily by each person. For example, with accommodation, some want casual friendly attitude, others want staff to stay strictly formal, etc. What is minute to me can be a huge deal to you. Rating systems can’t capture reviewer’s background in such a fine detail and control for it in rating calculations. Meanwhile, business owner’s ability to manage prospective guests’ expectations in advance is usually very limited (first, to manage them you must anticipate them, which requires non-trivial experience; second, it’s generally impossible to deny service to someone you suspect might not like your approach without getting a negative review anyway). This applies to dining and other service and to a degree product businesses.
My rating system now is 99% binary. (A) If I am on balance positive and want to support continued existence of a business, I give the service or the product a 5-star review (where I explain why I’m favorable and can note drawbacks that could be subjective or fall outside of business operator’s control). (B) If not, I post no feedback, but I may convey it in person. (C) Only if I’m unhappy about aspects that are definitely under business operator’s control, communication with the operator fails, and I want to warn other customers about important but non-obvious factors they should really know about, am I going to post a negative review. Except for fraud, I try to wait for a while first, because upon reflection those factors can still seem subjective.
Conversing with small business operators contributed to my decision.
On the other hand, when reading reviews, I am comparing the number of reviews to competitors (adjusted for business lifetime, too many or too few is a red flag), see what specifically is complained about in reviews (I want to see complaints about things that don’t matter to me much, perhaps from people with heightened expectations; no complaints at all is a red flag, but so are complaints about real basics if they seem genuine and not made out of spite), and monitor for any signs of artificial positive feedback or listing swaps (immediate red flags).
There’s not much room for exceptional above “arrived inviolated in a realistic time considering traffic” so living up to that is 5 stars.
Of course, I didn't take my own wisdom and signed the lease anyway, thinking "How bad can it be? I bet only really pissy people write these negative reviews anyway." Little did I know that in a year I would be writing my own multiparagraph 1 star review, documenting all the egregious behavior brought on by awful management during my year of suffering in that god forsaken "luxury" apartment, hoping to warn nameless others who might come after me.
Pretty much every single thing I was warned about in those negative reviews came true. So at least for rooting out awful property management companies, I find google reviews very useful if the distribution of the reviews are bimodal between 5 and 1 stars.
(Which? is a charity which publishes a magazine with independent reviews. My parents were subscribers for years, and would always use the Which? ratings when purchasing a new appliance, insurance or similar.)
So I wrote a 1 star Google review, stating, very politely, that the service was not what we expected, that our problems were not fixed, our mails not responded to etc. and that someone might think about this before doing business with him.
In less than five minutes the developer replied to two tickets, wrote me a mail and threatened me to remove the rating from Google, otherwise he would take legal action.
I added to the review that after posting the review I received a reply in 5 minutes and was threatened by the developer.
Still stands today. And it's not the only 1 star rating for that business with a case like that.
So... Not sure about Google ratings after all...
I do actually think Which? is a fairly good company that does a good thorough job (and I've bought a subscription before), but this is hardly news. Online review companies have no incentive to make their reviews accurate and their customers (the people who they're actually reviewing) are highly incentivised to cheat.
I don't have a guess as to how Google would handle that. But for something like Amazon -- surely it would be easier for Amazon to vet the products they list than to vet all the reviews for those products? When I shop on Amazon, the only reason I read the reviews is to determine if a product is shitty or not. If Amazon had a decent standard of product quality, I don't really need the review section. Besides, I can always return it if Amazon (or the reviews) are wrong.
I don't really trust Amazon/Google to actually review items themselves and I'm sure that would cause all sorts of other issues like Amazon/Google either lying/fudging to keep a big client or certain items not being popular enough for Amazon/Google to spend the time to vet.
I've literally had a single lone review on a product be immensely helpful. I was looking for RAM that would work in my Synology and I found it by model number but I wasn't sure if the listing was accurate (blurry image, bad description, etc). I scrolled down to the reviews and there was 1 single review that said something like "If you are buying this for the XXXXX Synology it will work, expect ~5min on first boot for it to check/scan/test the RAM and then you will be good to go". I bought it and it worked perfectly for me.
Without that review I might not have bought from that seller and instead paid ~20%+ more on another site. Reviews have problems for sure but I don't think getting rid of them or giving complete control to Amazon/Google/etc is the right fix.
Steam used to work this way, and they were a massive bottleneck for people who wanted to sell indie games on PC simply because they were being swamped with unsolicited content submissions. They lost out on Minecraft because of this. That's why they tried having users do their content vetting for them (see Steam Greenlight), which itself was a disaster but in a different way. Now it's just an app store: you register with Steam Direct and pay a filing fee and you can be on Steam. This is the only model that actually scales.
This is the dilemma every platform holder eventually hits: it's far more lucrative to just open yourself up to all comers and ban abusive sellers than to validate that someone is above-board before selling their stuff. The latter involves losing out on business opportunities. Traditional publishing models have to vet the content they sell because it's their money they're risking on what is effectively an investment into a copyrighted work. And they lose out on a lot of opportunities. However, platforms don't need to do this: the risks they take are far lower, so it makes far less sense to review content in advance.
Remember: Amazon's business model was built on the "long tail" - making any sort of subjective quality judgment contrary to the spirit of the company. And the judgment is subjective. There's very few instances where you can say a product is objectively terrible, and those are better covered by making them illegal and making platforms liable for selling such product.
I remember when the BBC was a shining beacon of broadcasting excellence via shortwave radio. How the mighty have fallen.
Sorry but if you're doing shady shit, it's no defence that everyone else is doing it too.
Push comes to shove, people are going to choose to feed their family. Apple doing fake reviews and a struggling low profit restaurant because all the other restaurants are inflating their reviews are different circumstances.
Watching the ever-normalizing review gaming and incentives to _not_ fix them, I am well past caring about finding out a business has bought a review.
My favorite local tasting room? I imagine they have the resources to invest in gaming, but I figure they'd stand their ground as long as possible out of a sense of integrity (and I would appreciate them all the more for this). Either way, good for them; I hope to enjoy many more years of their service[0].
My favorite m&p hole-in-the-wall? They don't exactly have a line out the door of raving, excited customers. And, I don't think they have the financial means to play ball. I root for them all the same.
[0] ...provided it doesn't turn for the worse.
(https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/03/21/394273902/...)
Somehow the rest of the world gets by with the opposite burden of proof just fine.
[1]: There's no guarantee that a fabricated review has been paid for by the business owner; or that all reviews from a given account are forged reviews (some might be genuine).
Maybe Google don't know about the practices of Trustpilot or maybe 'there is no evidence'?
Quite the opposite, Google is constantly being harassed by lawyers employed by businesses with bad ratings, using legal tricks to have legitimate reviews removed. Then what‘s left is a very distorted picture of the actual consumer ratings, so the system is quite skewed in businesses favor.
Let's say you are legit but just don't want to play this bullshit game at all (as otherwise you'd need to constantly monitor and be ready to try and take down the obviously fake reviews which you can prove are fake), can you do that?
I feel like these companies, even if they didn't have extortionate intentions, are still creating overhead for businesses that haven't asked for anything.
It's human nature to be predisposed to leave reviews when you have a bad experience.
Then you have those f'ing weirdos who leave reviews like "Burger was really good and all but the food I had at the French Laundry was way better! 2/5 stars!" at a local pub or something.
And then if the owner gets caught up in some shit that hits the news the reviews get brigaded by trolls who don't even live in a 500 mile radius or have any intention of ever going.
It's human nature to be predisposed to leave reviews when you have a bad experience.
Then you have those f'ing weirdos who leave reviews like "Burger was really good and all but the food I had at the French Laundry was way better! 2/5 stars!" at a local pub or something.
And then if the owner gets caught up in some shit that hits the news the reviews get brigaded by trolls who don't even live in a 500 mile radius or have any intention of ever going.
If you're truly interested in finding a good place to eat or get your oil changed or whatever there are far better methods than Yelp or google reviews.
Now if the police will investigate it is another matter.
You might think non-pseudonymous reviews would at least offer some protection against fake reviews, but it doesn’t seem to have helped in the slightest.
The other thing that annoys me is that nobody seems to be doing any kind of normalisation or calibration of ratings -- we just get simple average ratings, maybe with outliers filtered out.
Whatever happened to all the ratings algorithms that were developed for the Netflix Prize? That seemed like important work at the time, but it seems to have almost completely ignored.
That aside, why is it that people get to commit fraud and Google gets the blame?
From the examples in the article where the reviewers covered multiple businesses hundreds of miles apart like they were next to home, Google certainly has the location data to see if they were ever there, or for local businesses, knows who lives in range to be customers. Amazon and others have massive data on their users, and could apply a lot of AI tech to validate reviews for credibility, if they wanted to bother to do it right.
As a customer - just don't take reviews too serious.
I personally also prefer to avoid the very top and always take a look at subsequent pages of search results, also results from alternative search engines when I'm looking for a company to hire.
There's no option in Google Maps to report these users for being fraudulent.
For example: https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/104557996396454013599/re... https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/109949503069363340417/re...
In the past I've bought multiple products from them and there is 50% chance to get a really bad product but their Terms and Conditions + Lawyers and their activity make the return impossible for the customers and any complaints are attacked. From latest news they are still going strong with millions and billions in investments.
As a consumer I am conscious of how often I choose a particular restaurant because it has many high-star Google ratings. In a big city the difference between 4.0 stars (100 ratings) and 4.3 stars (700 ratings) is probably tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.
This is common with any company with a social media strategy, and pretty essential for certain companies in the B2C sector to get off the ground.
Which "certain companies" are you talking about? I'm running a software company, restaurant and a SaaS, all B2C and neither have "buying fake reviews" as a part of their social media budget. Neither does any of my acquaintances who also run a different set of businesses.
Response from the owner
This is spam and I reported it to google
The Internet has given the classic protection racket a whole new dimension (and legal cover).
It is sad, because real reviews could be extremely valuable (and they were, for a short time).
I guess this was inevitable.
Upon coming to place a review, recognised several names (in relation to above) of known staff including the franchise manager against numerous 5 star reviews. Mentioning the acronyms ACCC and CAV (Consumer Affairs Victoria) saw multiple false reviews removed in haste. Needless to say, a comment was included to that effect in my own review (with screen shots linking the offending reviews to staff)
All reported, all ignored by Google!
As a result I trust nothing I read on Google maps.
There's a great quote from Michael Crichton I will repeat here, as it's quite accurate.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.Hope it's better then the same "tech" that locks people out of their accounts.
Give the business an app to generate unique QR codes for each customer, and then have that customer use the code to make the review.
Now everyone knows that the review comes from a person who actually bought the product, the reviewer is more likely to be honest because their identity is known to the seller, and the business can even remediate the issue because they know which customer left the review.
To those saying anonymity equals honesty in the review, I really don't think that's the case, nor is it fair to the business. Much like our courts require an accuser to identify themselves to their attacker so their attacker can defend themselves, businesses should at least know who their accuser is, even if the rest of us don't.
Also how do I know the seller didn't bribe the buyer with a discount or something to create a positive review?
For the first one, it would have to be tied into the payment system somehow so the money would have to change hands. It doesn't totally solve the problem, but it certainly adds a cost, especially if the payment system requires unique customers. Heck, Google could make money like this by only allowing reviews for purchases via Google Pay.
For the second one, I'm not really sure, but if they bribe everyone with the same discount, it's not really a bribe anymore, it's just the new price. And if they don't offer everyone the bribe, then they will quickly get bad reviews.
I don't really care about the second point because it doesn't scale, people will do it anyway, and you can cozy right up to the line of literally paying for a good review in a million different "above board" ways.
How am I not harmed if I buy a product that is no good?
They are, for their own personal gain, using deceit to affect the behavior of others in a way that can cause harm to them.
It is fraud.
Just because each incident is a small scale, does not mean that it is not corrosive to society. Moreover, the point of the article is that this IS being done at scale, and scaled-up fraud is definitely corrosive to society. At the very least, it undermines trust in society, which is a prerequisite to a functioning society. Stop trying to minimize it.
Having to make a living is no excuse to perpetrate fraud. If the business, or their fake reviewers need to perpetrate fraud to make a living, they should do something else.