Google consistently has bad/non existent customer service
It is famously hard to talk to a google employee when you have a problem
Google has a history of primarily hiring devs
Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results
Google probably has the largest most experienced anti-SEO team on the earth
Google seems to want to stay out of the press
Google maps reviews are a very major competitive moat against other maps
Google is supported by ads, but AFAIK does not actively seek customers
Google does not do delivery
Google's money maker is getting information, maps is a major input
Maps is a secondary business able to be subsidized by search ad revenue
Inflated reviews/advantaged reviews would make ad customers happy
Selling position is potentially extremely profitable
What I wouldn't be surprised by is google systemically limiting negative reviews. In my experience A yelp 3.5 would be a 4 on google maps. A yelp 1 or 2 would be a 3 on google maps. 4 would be 4.5 on google maps. Google maps numbers are definitely inflated, but once you understand the relative scale it's just as good as pre-corrupt Yelp.
In order to remove a review on Google Business it needs to be fraudulent or outdated - e.g. the business has been remodeled and the review doesn't apply anymore.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.
>> So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review
No, it is possible to get something removed if it violates Googles policies that are designed to make sure reviews are on topic and legitimate.
>> The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.
Not true at all. I have personally told many clients who spent XXX million dollars with Google that reviews can not be touched if they follow Google policies. The customer is not the business, it is the users who trust these reviews. Google can do just fine without monetizing the reviews but will not survive without user trust. It will take 2 hours to become a global headline if Google did something like this. And if this was true no business would every have bad reviews.
Suppose you left Google for a google-affiliated Reputation agency, then your disclaimer would be correct, but your comments might be fishy. No way to know. In a general sense I wonder how many of such agencies operate on HN to give positive twists to discussions that may hurt brand image.
Yes. This is an understanding I buy:
Algorithmic/Systemic upward review pressure: easily removed/prevented reviews.
Alignment problem: money comes from business, not user.
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.
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.
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.
1) You posted a review which presumably got flagged as being spam/low-quality (maybe an automated system flagged it for having ALL CAPS or curse words, or who knows what).
2) You posted the same review on a different account, which now is flagged as double spam because now it looks like you are operating a sock-puppet account.
I think my version of events sounds a lot more likely than yours. If your thing was true, then you could sign up right now with your own fake business and find the page where you can remove reviews of your own business. Since no one has shown this to happen, one can only assume that it doesn't happen.
I think Google/Amazon etc try to mostly remove fake reviews, and that probably just catches reviewers who are giving 1 star angry-rants as "spam".
Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?
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.
"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."
I'm not sure what makes Google so different that it should be exempt from general trends around reviews. Businesses have their interest aligned here: removing negative reviews and faking positive reviews are beneficial to each individually, and can't be directly weaponized against competition. Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest; regular users will not replace Google Maps with OSM over a review issue, while a business might want to stop paying Google if they get bad experience on the marketing front.
Have you actually thought about this at all? Why on earth would ANYONE bother reading reviews that they know to be categorically fraudulent? Without keeping the reviews honest, at least to a degree that the general public considers them honest and legitimate, Google Maps Reviews becomes worthless and a dead product. Fake reviews are a very real threat to their product's value and Google arguably has very good strong incentives to keep reviews honest so people keep using them.
It's because most people don't pay attention and didn't figure out yet that on-line reviews in general are worthless, thoroughly gamed bullshit. Those who did figure it out - they don't stop using Yelp/Glassdoor/Amazon/eBay/Google Maps anyway, because those services still offer enough value to customers compensate for broken reviews.
So if regular users will be there either way, and manipulating reviews - or allowing them to be easily manipulated - increases retention of paying customers (businesses), which way the incentives blow?
--
When motive, money and power align,yet we still accept weak ass excuses?
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.
It obviously was intentional to lie to the user. We're just discussing the line at which intentional lies for selfish reasons can be called malicious.
Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?
They aren't like baby killers or anything, but they are certainly prioritizing their wallet over your consumer good and even safety.
Imagine if HN charged to post and shadow-banned users.
I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.
I intentionally did not make a concrete claim.
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.
In theory a review hoster is supposed to evaluate claims and act on reasonable ones. In practice review hosters are terrified of getting sued and will take down reviews easily.
I suspect most local businesses hire "reputation fixing" firms to actually do this dirty work for them.
Aside: somehow businesses get moved - even major ones like a local McDo got moved to the wrong location. Takes weeks for corrections from when I report them. I really can't understand that one. This too could be a killer for a small business, getting shifted to the wrong location.
In a similar vein, I'm forever having to report our opening hours and things to Facebook as we don't have any (small craft shop, open by arrangement) and people insist on adding some.
It's all really weirdly handled. I suppose it's the presence of untrustworthy parties in such disclosures though Google should have enough trust signals to weight users input.
In any case, the scenario you're describing is decidedly not pay-for-play on Google's part, and thus doesn't really impinge on my response to OP.
I'll assume Google's reviews are at least somewhat likely to be biased (either way!) until reason to believe otherwise. The "you don't know the review wasn't posted by a dog" position.
Reviews can be removed if they are shown to violate Google policies. Also, legal action can be taken to remove a review. Google does not write law about what reviews are permanent.
I wish Google would be terrified of getting sued, but we both know this is not gonna happen.
My friend is a business owner.
She received couple one-star reviews on google maps from customers she never had (she’s a real estate developer, real estate is expensive, she doesn’t have many customers).
Wasn’t able to do anything about them.
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.
And you used Google search to look for it, right? ...
(Kidding.)
And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...
But if that doesn't work for you, pretend I called it an unsubstantiated implication instead. Either way, I think we all understood what the OP meant, and we all understood what I meant in my response. So at least we are communicating.
I'll let you decide if that implication is unsubstantiated or not.
Today you go out and there's a pigeon sitting on the branch over your car, you scare it away.
Your friend is like "what did you do that for, you have no evidence this pigeon poops on cars!".
Your [asdfasgasdgasdg] position is "this pigeon might be fine" the OP's position appears to be [or at least, mine is] "pigeons are probably going to poop on my car". You're saying his position is insubstantiated ...
It's the difference between treating Google as unique, and treating them as a member of a class of businesses. It's not insubstantiated, it's just a different form of substantiation. If all advertising businesses the OP has dealt with before were underhanded then your position looks to them like "today is unique, maybe the sun won't rise".
tl;dr you can substantiate a position based on general behaviours of items in a class, it's not necessarily wrong, and can be just a different model.
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 went to Rotterdam again 1 year ago. My review was still there. A half-baked apology was under my comment. I walked by, no cars were blocking the ramps. I call that a win.
Basically, it's just me and the owner of the business that sees the review. The negative review I gave the scammy business doesn't show up when I sign out.
What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.
However, you could still be right.
You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible.
If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess.
Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.
What I really meant is that I don't trust Google in this situation. That lack of trust still exists and is not a conspiracy.
And I _would_ be surprised if Google actually did the right thing here.
Do you have any evidence of this claim? Have you seen businesses be able to do that? Surely, the hundreds of thousands of businesses on Google, one of them has talked about the ability to remove reviews.
That's why I said that "I would not be surprised if..." which doesn't make a concrete claim. To me, it means, "I don't know, but it seems plausible in my limited experience."
I am making no claim other than pure speculation, and I know it.
Edit: typo.
I doubt google is investigating each bad review they receive, though, so it happening to both accounts is odd.
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.
(1) Anyone can easily see why you're banned, if they want to turn 'showdead' on in their profile and look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski ;
(2) Anyone can easily get an answer about why they're banned on HN, simply by asking us;
(3) Anyone can easily get themselves unbanned on HN if they want to use the site in the intended spirit as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I 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.)