I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was not there. I waited an hour and checked. Then a couple hours and checked. Then a day. It never showed up.
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.)
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
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 see your Hanlon's Razor, and I raise you Hanlon's Handgun of mine:
"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.
> Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest
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.
Why does anyone read Yelp reviews? They're gamed, and also used to extort businesses. Why does anyone read Glassdoor reviews? They're completely gamed by the employers[0], and the company itself recently pivoted into brand management - which translates into fake reviews being their core product now. Why does anyone read Amazon/eBay reviews? They're gamed too! Why does anyone read reviews on random small e-commerce sites? Those often aren't even reviews, they just look like 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?
That saying has it limits, most pf these excuses are sounding very improbable, like:
"oh i didnt mean to rob the place, i found the door unlocked and walked in to give it a good clean."
When motive, money and power align,yet we still accept weak ass excuses?
Its almost certainly an anti spam system. The system marked the review as spam, for whatever reason. And it doesn't publish the results. The system doesn't tell you this because otherwise the first thing you will do is keep trying again in different ways until it doesn't tell you it was marked as spam.
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.
Yes, in fact, if there's some delay in processing reviews through the anti-spam system, the OP might have triggered the failure themselves by then posting the exact same review under another (their wife's) account. If I'm writing an anti-spam system, duplicate reviews from different accounts are like the most obvious heuristic imaginable.
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 intentionally created a system which resulted in a user being unintentionally shadow-banned. Creating a shadow-banning system isn't malicious. Creating a shadow-banning system that accidentally shadow-bans legitimate users is pretty obviously more a case of stupidity than malice. Just because they created the system intentionally, doesn't mean unintended behaviours in the system are intentional malice
Hmm, that's interesting. If I was writing a review moderation algorithm, it would leave only one copy up if there were multiple substantially identical reviews. Those are likely to be written by bots that mutate a common review and post, or even if some entity circulates a "review" to its crew of minions who write fake reviews based on that template.
I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews
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.
As a business owner, you only need to claim the review is fraudulant and that will usually get it removed.
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.
I helped a couple of small businesses set up maps business listings a few years back. One was going great for years then in about 3-4 days got a bunch of fraudulent bad reviews from a disgruntled ex exployee. We tried for months to remove them, every single way possible but were never able to. In the end we had to nuke the whole Google business listing, which wasn't easy either.
You can reply though, IIRC. A good response to a negative review is a massive plus to me.
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 don't know how to square this claim with the plethora of businesses with many negative reviews on both Google and Yelp. If it were this easy, you'd think everyone would be doing it. Probably someone would have written a blog post describing how to do so. I can find out how to buy gmail accounts on Google, but I can't find out how to remove business reviews. Maybe the claim is just that most small businesses are very honest?
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 think almost all SME owners would assume they'd have to pay (Yelp model), rather than just be able to lie and say it's fraud. Also who is going to advertise after the fact that they falsely had reviews removed - risking getting dumped by Google?
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.
I don't really care if you assume the reviews are biased. I assume that all review websites have some number of fake reviews, and it's unlikely that exactly half of the fake reviews are negative and the other half positive. Therefore all review websites would have some bias vs the ground truth sentiment. My only objection is to baseless accusations of malfeasance.
Absolutely not true. Worked on this team for Google at one point and other than internal systems nothing can get reviews removed. Firms cant do anything, they are just swindling people out of money. Some of them will get fake reviews to try and drown out negative ones but its very short lived.
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.
I thought the part about "only internal systems" would imply that external parties can not remove reviews. But if not then let me clarify, yes there are anti-abuse mechanisms that can remove reviews. But these are not based on customer complaints or how much they are paying Google for ads, they are based on Googles own internal policies which are designed to make sure the reviews are legitimate.
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).
I don’t know how they did it, but a doctor surgery near me (UK) had a large number of negative reviews up for several years. About one week ago, I looked and they now have one single 5 star review. So, anecdotally, there is at least some way to get the reviews removed.
Kinda like how they handle false copyright claims by not taking down the content, oh wait ... that seems a similar situation in that acting on false content takedown requests doesn't get them [much/any] revenue and provides a relational hit to users (but pleases some huge customers, no doubt).
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.
There is probably a button for business owner to complain about a review, for example in case of competitor bombing? Since nothing on google can be appealed this button is as good as removal of reviews at will
And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...
Again, I can't find even a hint of how to do this on the internet. If there is a way, you'd expect it to be documented given what surely must be widespread interest in the subject. Basically what we have here is an entirely unsubstantiated and unlikely accusation. (Unlikely because the incentives simply are not aligned.)
If you said of someone, "I wouldn't be surprised if they were a thief," that would rightly be viewed as a pseudo-accusation of thievery or other dishonesty. It doesn't literally mean the same thing as "he is a thief," but saying you believe someone has a decent chance of being a thief is still a type of accusation -- one of dishonesty and distrust. If the belief is unjustified, then I think it's fair to call it an unsubstantiated accusation.
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.
You should just say that, then. If I don't trust someone, that doesn't mean it's OK to go around and imply that they do some absurd malicious thing I have absolutely no evidence they actually do. It's fine not to trust them. Spreading unsubstantiated rumors and implications is not fine.
You go out each day and pigeons have shat (pooped) on your car.
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.
But there are no popular review websites that allow business owners to pay to remove negative reviews. So the inductive approach you advocate favors my position.
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.
I stayed in a hotel in Rotterdam one time (5-6 years ago). The entrance had a ramp for wheelchairs/prams. A bunch of a*holes parked their luxury cars blocking that ramp. On the second morning the cars were still there I called the concierge out to see this. Then I took a picture of him, of the cars, and their plates and told him I will call the Police in 5mins (yes I am THAT kind of guy). In two minutes all cars were gone never to reappear (I stayed there 10 days). I left a 1star review to the hotel, under my name, with photos of the cars (not their plates) and a comment about blocking the ramp, hotel staff was informed multiple times and didn't react.
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.
The same happened to me. The negative review shows up when i'm signed in but it did not affect the rating (number of stars) of the business.
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.
Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for a random dinky business to bribe an engineer at Google? There are businesses that are literally making bank for Google and still can't get in touch with a human being at Google when their Google account gets locked, app gets removed from the Play Store, etc.
What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.
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.
Note that I didn't say Google let businesses pay for reviews; all I said was that "I wouldn't be surprised" if Google let businesses do the spam filtering and flag reviews.
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.
So all of your statements basically say that you think Google reviews are pay to play because you dont trust them to do something right. Sure, you have the right to that opinion.
I'm not sure if Google does it indirectly, but they definitely do this practice with their "partners" (probably just a convenient way to shift liability of more shady practices) to review partners like Trustpilot (I get their sales calls all the time, so I know what benefits they offer to businesses in terms of "moderating" reviews).
> 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.
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.
It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something. Maybe that business was caught buying reviews and so Google stopped allowing new ones for a while. Or it reported it was getting spammed. Or some other situation like that.
> 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.
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.
I've had the exact same experience. Several days later I got an email from Google saying the review was now live, but it's still not there. Other reviews that I wrote years ago are hidden, too.
My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn't of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them.
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.
Imagine you operate in an industry where these reviews are not permitted. You have your regulator telling you to remove them with no means of actually achieving that.
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.
> My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them.
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.
The review was against google policy (conflict of interests) and google provided ways to remove it were not handled by google at all. So this was not the case of taking off a legit review.
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.
I don't know where the idea that taking Google to court would cost you infinite amount of money comes from. First you get your lawyer to just write a letter stating clearly what's wrong, and what action you're aiming to take by which point. Keep it reasonable. Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking and set a date by which you will initiate legal proceedings if they don't respond. In my experience that alone solves 90% of problems even against large companies, because they know ignoring it will cost them more money. And if you do end up going to court over a small thing like this it's not going to be a court case out of TV drama that takes 20 years and costs millions.
Yes, also in general in a legal dispute you can make it very clear at the start what you would accept to resolve the matter. So if you end up going to court or otherwise running up large legal fees, at the end of the process you can point to the earlier communication and say 'We would have settled this matter quickly and cheaply at the start, for the same or less than what we have got now. Therefore Google should have to cover our fees.'
It's interesting that I've not yet seen the free speech argument break out here; when it comes to qanon nonsense people are very keen to defend the right of posters and denounce any removal as censorship.
An interesting thing about paid reviews - you can prove that the reviews are fake, but you usually can't prove that the business itself actually paid for those reviews. In a hypothetical world where companies with fake reviews are regularly discovered and lambasted in public, it's easy to imagine a sinister metagame where unscrupulous small businesses can buy bad good reviews (i.e. 5-star reviews that are obviously fake) for their competitors to make them seem sketchy. The folks selling the fake reviews certainly don't care who's paying. There's no obvious solution to me for that potential problem aside from stopping fake reviews before they're posted (which feels like the kind of thing that's much harder than it sounds); thankfully it doesn't appear to be a very common thing yet.
This happened with normal search, Google punished companies for spam links to their websites which caused sites to pay for bad links to their competition to raise their relative ranking.. It's now necessary for everyone to review links to their site and disown them.
I created a small one-off blog a while ago for a single hiking trip I made, and as you might imagine, I link to several product sites for the equipment I use - plain ol' links, not affiliated or anything.
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.
We got an alert from Amazon that if we didn’t stop faking reviews we would be terminated. Given that we have never done so, it was quite a shock to us. I wonder which competitor of ours feels threatened.
The other than that may be happening is bots building legitimacy.
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.
None of these limitations work. There are facebook and IM groups set up where real users of Amazon sit and companies offer free products to these people for good reviews.
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.
That's fine. Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews. Have them hand over their books for lighter penalties, then hit the companies buying fake reviews with enforcement orders as well.
Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .
> Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews.
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 wonder the extent to which it's possible for such body shops to get accounts that are believed by Google to live in the U.S. (or fake-review destination country of choice). I see sites that purport to offer such accounts for 30-50 cents per account. So I guess it's not that expensive. I wonder how often these accounts get burned and how much revenue they generate with each account beforehand.
That’s exactly what services like luminati.io (holavpn) are used for. While accounts can be purchased, they then need to remain tied to a US IP address to avoid being restricted.
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.
Disclaimer: Worked on the google anti-abuse team that handled this a while back.
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 :)
Another factor that reinforces your conclusion (you can't prove who did or didn't buy them) is that a smart botmaster would have their fake reviewers also review random businesses that did not pay them.
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...
I'm convinced that something similar is happening to Boris Johnson's tweets at the moment. Every time he posts, many of the top responses are exact copies of each other saying something like "the country is behind you, my prime minister <3". It's clear to anyone that these are 'fake', and I'd imagine it has the effect of making people thing that the conservatives are trying to artificially bolster his reputation.
I feel for business owners today, reviews are gamed more than ever and as a result have become much less valuable, harder to use for consumers, and with this fraud a few bad reviews can tarnish what is an unblemished customer service record. When making purchases i find i skip over dozens of reviews to find one or two that have some quality to them i can relate to based on the product and my expectations. When i see a really bad review i weigh it for much less than i used to especially if it lacks all the necessary components of a review. Does anyone else do this? Have you noticed that some reviews just look the same even the bad ones?
For at least the last couple of years I ignore them entirely. I just have zero faith in any of them anymore.
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.
On Amazon, they could just make the refund/returns rate for a product public. That would probably be a pretty good quality indicator for physical goods.
They'd just start buying their own product (which then goes right back into the supply chain) to skew the numbers. However, I do agree this is a good next step as it ups the costs significantly (the transaction fees as well as logistics of having to move your product in a loop) compared to buying fake reviews.
They probably do it already. I know for a fact this is an existing practice on Allegro - Polish eBay equivalent. What happens is a boss gets their employees to order their products with on-site pickup, or post + payment on delivery, wait few days, and upload a five-star review. Rinse, repeat. The product is, of course, never sent. The company loses on platform fees, but it's profitable if used to fabricate social proof for new listings, or to compensate for the few negative reviews weren't able to bribe away, that drag down your total rating too close to the point the platform may cancel your privileges or ban your account.
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.
And allow reviews only from customers who have actually bought the product - they do it to some extent today, with "verified purchase" label, but it would be nice to not even let customers review products that they haven't bought
I've had a single, meaningless three-star Google review from a non-client for 5+ years now. I responded saying I didn't recognize them as a client, but all most people will see is the three stars.
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.
I used to use and love a fintech app, they pivoted (in a way) from targeting banking nerds (with features like on the fly coupling of cards to accounts, an API, unlimited simple payment websites, etc, really nice, innovative features) to targeting "the Green crowd" (integrated their Insta feed into the app, pushed a more expensive subscription with social features that planted trees as you spend money, etc). I saw them go from 4.5 to below 2 stars over the course of a couple of days. But then after some days they were back at 4.7 with the CEO gloating that everyone loved the new version even more than the old one. The forum and the play store were filled with emotional complaints and even new users must have been bothered by all the bugs the new version introduced. I don't believe any of the play store reviews anymore since then.
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.
I'm surprised more of these comments aren't focused on how glaringly flawed the 5-star democratic rating system has become. I felt like the rise of Uber made it abundantly clear that anything less than a 5.0 means you were not satisfied with the service and don't think the business should continue.
This drives me nuts. Im operating under the assumption of a linear distribution. 4/5 still means in the 80th percentile. It’s better than average. 3/5 is “not amazing, not bad, what I would expect, an utterly normal experience”.
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”.
Each “linear” rating you give may significantly affect someone else’s business, but is in fact more revealing about yourself and your expectations—and is based on a scale that can be really different from mine or other customers’.
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).
I agree with you, but I can't in good conscience leave anything less than 5 stars for people working in the gig economy. As long as an Uber driver gets me to where I'm going and isn't driving recklessly I'll give them a 5 even though most of them should be a 3 (going by a linear system). There's no way I could mess with someone's livelihood like that.
Why not adjust your ratings to fit the prevailing perception? Presumably the reason you're leaving reviews is not for yourself, but to help others, be it the business or future customers. To that end, it seems an adjustment is in order.
How is the prevailing perception helpful to anyone ?
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 find the distribution of the reviews far more telling. Apartment complex has a ton of 5 star reviews, but the distribution is bimodal with a huge peak on the 1 star reviews? I'll trust the 1 star reviews as the 5 star reviews were clearly written by the leasing office to bring up the mean rating: overtly flowery and glowing. No one writes a google review for their apartment unless the landlord is awful.
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.)
Anecdotal but whatever: We worked with a software developer for some Magento stuff. Bought a plugin from him, support was awful, waited several weeks for a reply on our tickets, didn't respond to mails at all.
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.
Trusted review website Which? Investigates review website and find they're not as good as Which?
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 can't help but wonder if reviews should just be eliminated.
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.
If you only host known-quality product, then the scope of what you sell is greatly reduced. This isn't because you're filtering out bad product, but because you do not have the resources to actually vet everything flowing through your store. And this isn't so much an Amazon thing, or restricted to particular verticals.
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 have to assume this would lead to a worse end outcome for everyone. I don't trust the reviews on any website completely but reading through enough of them tends to give me a decent idea of how good a product is. I'll read the top, bottom, and middle reviews and read them across multiple sites if possible. I don't do this for everything but for larger purchases or long-use items I do.
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.
If many companies are doing it, and many are forced (or feel forced) to do it in order to compete, then it isn't fair to just single one or two of them for public shaming via a publicly funded broadcaster. There's also libel ... maybe the threshold of evidence is high enough to write an article about some unnamed company buying reviews, but not high enough to hold up in court.
> If many companies are doing it, and many are forced (or feel forced) to do it in order to compete, then it isn't fair to just single one or two of them for public shaming via a publicly funded broadcaster.
Sorry but if you're doing shady shit, it's no defence that everyone else is doing it too.
In a corrupt society, you get nowhere being morally absolute. There’s different shades of shady, but you only have one life to live, and depending on the circumstances, your best option might be to play ball.
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.
Not a direct reply to anything in the thread, but I felt it's fairly on-topic to point out something I just realized with myself on seeing the n+1st headline and now wonder how long ago my default reaction evolved to this.
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.
If everybody is doing it, it is known, and Google doesn't address it, what do you do as a business? Sue Google, who certainly has a "no warranty" clause in their ToS about reviews? No, of course you buy fake reviews too. I have trouble blaming them here. Losing customers for the sake of your sense of righteousness helps no one.
"In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses."
At this point there seems to be little benefit in shaming individual companies. At best it's a relatively minor cleanup, at worst you risk harming innocent people[1]. It looks like Which? focused on Google, this seems an appropriate long term approach.
[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).
At least Google didn't build their rating system specifically to blackmail businesses into paying for tools that can get negative ratings removed. Unlike Trustpilot.
> Google didn't build their rating system specifically to blackmail businesses into paying for tools that can get negative ratings removed
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.
That's not the same as Trustpilot. Their rating system is specifically built so paying businesses can remove ratings themselves while nonpaying can't . They can ask for proof of purchase and then only accept those that have both proof and a good rating. That's what most do.
I wonder if there's a way to legally forbid scummy companies like Trustpilot from accepting & publishing reviews (both good and bad) about your company.
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.
I'm not even sure what non-distorted ratings are supposed to be. What you mention obviously makes them more inaccurate, but they aren't accurate to begin with. Ratings are a messy human affair, I don't know why we bother quantifying it...
Yeah reviews are a shitshow almost no matter what.
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.
Yeah reviews are a shitshow almost no matter what.
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.
I remember when Google started requiring reviewers to publish their real names, 10 or 12 years ago (slightly before the concerted push behind Google+). I’m pretty sure the review quality was better back then, though probably only because the scammers and spammers hadn’t yet flooded the system.
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.
I've been offered so many goodies for good reviews on everything from Amazon to restaurants that want good reviews on Yelp. Sometimes they will even offer you a coupon for a 5* review on a receipt.
That aside, why is it that people get to commit fraud and Google gets the blame?
It's both. The individuals themselves are to blame for the fraudulent reviews, and Google and other services are to blame for fostering environments that allow fraudulent reviews to be so prevalent.
Because Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, Amazon, etc. actually run the services, and they have the technology to validate it, but simply can't be bothered to get it right. So, they sell you allegedly good information, but deliver fraud.
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.
I also just recently bought YouTube subscribers so that I can get a custom URL. Not sure why Google doesn't allow people to buy their name if they don't have 1,000 subscribers. Or at least let verified businesses and nonprofits which they sponsor get a custom channel URL. Sometimes, people are forced to game a system if it's built in a nonsensical way. I've been using Fakespot for years, so the fake reviews only matter to Google and their ranking.
Today business is all about reviews and search results. You need to be in the top of your segment and have good reviews. You have to manipulate the reviews this or that way and have a budget for that.
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.
I've noticed a number of fake seeming reviews on local businesses here in Vancouver, BC. The accounts seem to be leaving fake reviews across Canada. It's particularly suspicious to me given the improper grammar and almost entire lack of reference to anything specific to the business. The accounts also seem to give 100% 5 star reviews.
There's no option in Google Maps to report these users for being fraudulent.
I've seen this too - a fake business (one selling bait-and-switch low quality services through online storefronts) had many 5 star reviews, and if you clicked into their profiles you'd see a smattering of 5 stars reviews all across the country, sometimes in different countries. Some of them also gave a few 1 star reviews to a few places, probably the flip side of the same review selling business.
Yes, the inflation of ratings has been ridiculous. It's meaningless even in supposedly heavily guarded services like Audible. Just about every audio book is 4.3 stars out of 5 or higher. I just use what's behind the fractional number as a rough guide (since everything will be 4.something) and go with that. Except even then it appears that many titles are inflated via click farms.
I have a friend that's working as a sales agent for a company that is putting pressure on the sales agents to make the customers at any cost leave a good review on multiple platforms, some of them became really crafty and did anything necessary in order to make the customers leave a 5 star review.
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.
This sucks for customers but as a business owner it's pretty rational behavior. If everyone is going to judge your business based on some 3rd-party rating and someone offers to boost that rating for you for a few hundred dollars ... you have to be very confident and moral to say no.
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.
> 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.
I got an an offer to give me five star reviews for a modest fee. When that happened I had a look around to see what I could do to report them to stop their behaviour. I found absolutely nothing. Much like when the algorithmic banhammer hits you, the options for actively communicating with Google in a meaningful manner are close to non-existent.
There were a few google reviews for a service I recently used that I wondered about...
Response from the owner
This is spam and I reported it to google
There were a handful of those review responses. Made me wonder if spam features could be abused to mask bad reviews. I think at least in Yelp you can still see the data right?
I have caught several businesses doing the same thing in my country. The difference is that they don't buy them, they have their own employees write them. This results in patterns that make it obvious they were written by the same person. Google couldn't care less.
Noticed similar. Had a pretty acrimonious hire experience with a large Thrifty Car rental franchise based out in suburban Melbourne (Australia) regarding admin fees for damage/repair not being disclosed in the written legal documentation. Conversation ultimately ended with "Thanks for your feedback on disclosure"
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)
I know of a couple of businesses (owned by the same person) whose reviews are full of glowing testimonials - all posted by employees. He's even stupid enough to post them under his own name!
All reported, all ignored by Google!
As a result I trust nothing I read on Google maps.
I think we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t imagine that every review platform anyone uses is riddled with fake reviews. My experience with Yelp is that business owners may also take to harassing you personally for writing a negative one.
Reviews are now so gamified as to be completely worthless. Most users don't have much experience, and the experience they do have with the item might be completely out of line with how it was intended to be used or operated.
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.
If you could opt-in to change Amazon and other online retailer's customer aggregated reviews to an authoritative nonpartisan review created by a professional product reviewer, would you do it? Why (not)?
the whole comprehensive reviews don't work. time has proven it. at the moment, I'm building a service, where you don't rate the business but rate the actual service you got. no star ratings. but text which is native to every literate individual and can be easily read by machine. reach out, if you wanna sign up for the beta list.
This article is really about (the group) Which? asking for regulatory action i.e. the purpose of journalism isn't only to tell you that the building fell over, but also what the consequences for wider society are.
Many people still believe online reviews are mostly authentic. I've heard more cynical people state that they can spot the fakes. They are wrong, or course, which is why this is news.
because as tuned in as you might be, the majority of people out there still have their collective heads in the sand and put a lot of weight on the reviews on commerce sites.
Same here. I'm not surprised in the slightest; this is common practice on Amazon already, and Yelp/BBB have allowed businesses to pay to remove negative reviews for years. I'm not sure if that's the case on Google reviews yet.
If feels like this could be solved if Google/Yelp/Etc wanted to solve it, but it would cut into their profits.
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.
There are often a variety of overly simplistic solutions to a problem that address one issue but sacrifice a lot in return. The reality is that fake reviews are incredibly difficult to solve.
Because all reviews are tied to an active Google account which is pseudo-tied to an IRL identity.
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.
Well, those problems happen now, so it's not strictly worse than what we have now, but those are good points.
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 can't blame these companies, they are people, they have to make a living. It's not like they are actively harming anyone. So who should we blame? Google are also just trying to make money, they are also not hurting anyone over here.
If you are going to try to put it in perspective, do it right.
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.
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.)