cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50778217
🗺️ While visiting Pride Berlin, I learned how utterly pointless Google Maps Reviews in Germany are.
⭐ Any place can simply report negative reviews for defamation or claim the person was never there and have it removed.
Users can then appeal & risk a lawsuit.
When a review is removed the removed count on Google Maps goes up (🖼️ 1)
However that count is reset after 365 days and also only goes to 250! (🖼️ 2)
Therefore companies can simply mass report negative reviews to improve their rating.
https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/16997273
So many vulnerable people are relying on Google Maps reviews & ratings to tell them where it is save to go.
Some places have only 1000-2000 reviews but >250 reviews removed in the past 365 days!
Like how bad must the situation there be?!
Absolute shame.
Obligatory ‘Fuck Google’.
They should just straight up put a big, red exclamation mark on averages for places where unusually many reviews are removed, with an appeal process for the business, not the users.
On that lawsuit thing thought: You don’t risk anything by appealing. Courts don’t care what Google has to say. The business can sue you right away, they don’t need to remove anything first. If what you said are simple facts however, there is nothing they can do. Nothing but ask Google to remove it anyway.
I wrote this a few months ago:
On the other hand, a business owner has no other tool against review bombing except this. In a village near me a barber shop was review bombed by neo-nazis due to their support for refugees. They removed the fake reviews successfully but from time to time this Nazi scum remembers and review bomb them again. This goes on since at least 2020.
This is a real issue, especially since Google just ignores review reports
In Germany there some companies who after a few months just “force provement of visit” on all low reviews. And then the person who post the review is required do fight back and upload a receipt of the store. It’s verry annoying to find real good stores
OpenStreetMaps should include reviews so that I can get info from my geeks and nerd online frens
We’re moving towards that! Short story keep an eye on CoMaps in coming weeks, long story here. :)
rating:user:ChaoticNeutralCzech=1review:user:ChaoticNeutralCzech="Nowhere near American Flag Blue as advertised"
Google maps reviews are pretty useless in general. I find they’re only to be read for entertainment value.
Not useless, that’s a warning to avoid the business.
Yeah this basically says “don’t go there” you can generally find some good places that don’t just remove bad reviews.
That’s all of them. People with grievances have good reviews removed too tbh
Always give a 2-star rating and explain that you would rather give it zero stars. Google won’t remove it without much more investigation.
Not pointless, find the new average, everything removed was a 1 star
But the removed count only includes a one year period and caps out at 250, how would you find the new average?
It will still give you an upper bound. “No better than X on average”
