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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] ghoward|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] hayst4ck|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggggtez|5 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] Laremere|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThorAway00|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HenryBemis|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phr4ts|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arkitaip|5 years ago|reply
What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.
[+] [-] throwaway_1301|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chrischen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipsum2|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thehappypm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyqydsyq|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] choppaface|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trollski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agsamek|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ficklepickle|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zeepzeep|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blub|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bbutterworth|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rococode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foolmeonce|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beckingz|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|5 years ago|reply
Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .
[+] [-] throwaway_1301|5 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] bootlooped|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] tasssko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JetAlone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] schnevets|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Symbiote|5 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] martin_a|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Traster|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cmckn|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tpmx|5 years ago|reply
I remember when the BBC was a shining beacon of broadcasting excellence via shortwave radio. How the mighty have fallen.
[+] [-] Daho0n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stormqloud|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iainmerrick|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
That aside, why is it that people get to commit fraud and Google gets the blame?
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nikolay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zwass|5 years ago|reply
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...