UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#191

Post by throwaway_1301 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 5:15 AM UTC

rococode wrote: post #32

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 f…

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 :)

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#192

Post by 3np » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 5:16 AM UTC

fairity wrote: post #166

3np wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

If the platform clearly communicates "this is what different rankings mean in our system" before I submit the input sure, but that is yet to happen.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#193

Post by rapnie » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

throwaway_1301 wrote: post #189

Schweigi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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 businesse…

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#194

Post by Rule35 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:02 AM UTC

wyqydsyq wrote: post #186

Rule35 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not "accidental" because they had to create and maintain it. Stupid would be them intending but failing to make post visible.

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

The maliciousness comes in with the self-interest. They're lying to you because they make more money when you don't know to complain.

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#195

Post by nikolay » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#196

Post by themodelplumber » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

tasssko wrote: post #124

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…

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#197

Post by Schweigi » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:45 AM UTC

OccamsMirror wrote: post #184

Schweigi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#198

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:58 AM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #58

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.

[deleted]

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#199

Post by agsamek » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:10 AM UTC

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#200

Post by blub » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

agsamek wrote: post #199

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 o…

If you're in the EU, maybe you can sue Google?

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.