Is anyone conducting research to make reviews more trustworthy?
UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
111–120 of 232 posts
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
This a well-known issue with british libel law. The UK needs to reform to stay relevant.
I'm not sure this would be better. I could claim you murdered 5 puppies last year, how would you go on to proof that you did not?
And I could claim that you love Madonna's latest album.
Somehow the rest of the world gets by with the opposite burden of proof just fine.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#113I 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 quali…
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.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#114Thats why Tripadvisor reviews are most trustable. reason? It's not google.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#115I 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…
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.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#116There is a global ethics pandemic. No?
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#117I'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.
As always relevant xkcd
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#118I 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 quali…
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.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#119I 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…
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 t…
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.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#120I 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…
Here is my reading of your situation:
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".