Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

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I am no google fanboy, but I WOULD be surprised to find such a thing. The reason I would be surprised is history and alignment.

  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

On the counter side

  Inflated reviews/advantaged reviews would make ad customers happy
  Selling position is potentially extremely profitable

I just don't see it. It's not googles MO. It's yelps MO. That's why I use google maps as my primary tool for finding whats good.

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.

This is a great reply to my post and answers me better than any of the others I have seen thus far.

Any curse words or something that a system might flag?

No, I actually do not swear at all.

Google Business (business.google.com) which is used for managing a business on Google/Google Maps has surprisingly pretty good customer support (for Google :) ). There is an option to request help and when you decline all the automated answers it's possible to send a text to a real person. Up to now all requests to remove reviews, photos, or previous/old business listings have been resolved in 2-3 business days.

In order to remove a review on Google Business it needs to be fraudulent or outdated - e.g. the business has been remodeled and the review doesn't apply anymore.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.

Interesting! Definitely not something I've read about often.

Yes. This is an understanding I buy:

  Algorithmic/Systemic upward review pressure: easily removed/prevented reviews.
  Alignment problem: money comes from business, not user.

This is a satisfying understanding of why things are the way they are.

I've found it almost impossible to remove bad reviews on Google. We've had several drive-by 1 star reviews from people in different countries that have zero relation to our business.

Did you use the report functionality or did you go through support? If the review has no relation to your business it’s a clear violation of the review policies and you can report it. For us nothing happened after reporting such reviews and only after contacting support they got removed.

It's even hard to get 5 * reviews removed. They aren't allowed for consumer finance co's in Canada but we still couldn't get them removed.

Discalaimer: I used to work on the Google team that worked on anti-abuse for comments/ratings.

>> 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.

Not saying you are not honest, but for others it is hard to verify a throwaway account. Or trust, for that matter, if all comments posted so far are made fiercely defending Google practices.

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.

I think there's an assumption here that needs to be addressed, and that's that Google functions as a single entity with consistent and coherent policies and actions across all its arms.

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 knows its bread and butter is legitimate results

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.

Yep, today when I type anything into the search box, most of the time the result is highly "SEO"ed result by media and agencies, unlike the old days

Around ‘08 or ‘09 they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and decided webspam could rank highly as long as it didn’t get too nasty. The whole web (as far as searches results will tell you) promptly turned into webspam. I imagine this, along with their plainly-evil inlining of ads with search results within a couple years of that, made their profit arrow go up-and-to-the-right so hard that no-one who opposed those moves was paid any mind.

Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results

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.

Yeah I just don't see this being a thing either. If Google allowed businesses to pay to moderate (i.e. censor) their own reviews at their own will then that destroys any legitimacy in the reviews of a business, eliminating any value of Google Maps reviews to the end-customer and killing the product.

I understand this works in theory, but people still use Yelp, right?

Do they? I've never even heard it mentioned before other than in reference to controversies around them being dodgy. Maybe it's just not popular in my locale, but I've never heard of anyone using it or recommending it. By contrast I've used Google Maps reviews, and know of other people using it a lot

Yelp gave up on international reviews to focus on the US explicitly because they couldn't do internationalization. Google maps works quite well internationally except in Korea and China.

Indenting your text formats it as code, making it unteadable.

Sorry about that. I don't think hacker news allows you to format lists, but I wanted a list. It increases the readability on desktop, but destroys it on mobile.

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