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

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#201

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #200

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.

[deleted]

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#202

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

wyqydsyq wrote: post #171

TeMPOraL wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your Hanlon's Razor, and I raise you Hanlon's Handgun of mine: "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,…

> Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest 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 p…

Why does anyone read Yelp reviews? They're gamed, and also used to extort businesses. Why does anyone read Glassdoor reviews? They're completely gamed by the employers[0], and the company itself recently pivoted into brand management - which translates into fake reviews being their core product now. Why does anyone read Amazon/eBay reviews? They're gamed too! Why does anyone read reviews on random small e-commerce sites? Those often aren't even reviews, they just look like 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?

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24789865

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#203

Post by vasco » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #200

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.

They said they had money for PR but probably not infinite amounts to take on Google at court.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#204

Post by martin_a » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

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.

So... Not sure about Google ratings after all...

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#205

Post by gambiting » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:58 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #203

blub wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They said they had money for PR but probably not infinite amounts to take on Google at court.

I don't know where the idea that taking Google to court would cost you infinite amount of money comes from. First you get your lawyer to just write a letter stating clearly what's wrong, and what action you're aiming to take by which point. Keep it reasonable. Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking and set a date by which you will initiate legal proceedings if they don't respond. In my experience that alone solves 90% of problems even against large companies, because they know ignoring it will cost them more money. And if you do end up going to court over a small thing like this it's not going to be a court case out of TV drama that takes 20 years and costs millions.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#206

Post by test1235 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:02 AM UTC

foolmeonce wrote: post #51

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…

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.

I created a small one-off blog a while ago for a single hiking trip I made, and as you might imagine, I link to several product sites for the equipment I use - plain ol' links, not affiliated or anything.

I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do this.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#207

Post by hayst4ck » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

wyqydsyq wrote: post #177

bscphil wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this works in theory, but people still use Yelp, right?

Do they? I've never even heard it mentioned before other than in reference to controversies around them being dodgy. Maybe it's just not popular in my locale, but I've never heard of anyone using it or recommending it. By contrast I've used Google Maps reviews, and know of other people using it a lot

Yelp gave up on international reviews to focus on the US explicitly because they couldn't do internationalization. Google maps works quite well internationally except in Korea and China.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#208

Post by null-10-03-2021 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:20 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #200

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.

I guess you might have success if FB is making a page that appears to be representing your business.

Because well, that seems like misrepresentation, or straight up fraud.

But publishing reviews of your business sounds well within the bounds of freedom of speech.

Pretending that the page hosting those reviews is affiliated with you, probably not legal unless you have agreed to it.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#209

Post by switch007 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:28 AM UTC

odnes wrote: post #66

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…

I'm convinced that something similar is happening to Boris Johnson's tweets at the moment. Every time he posts, many of the top responses are exact copies of each other saying something like "the country is behind you, my prime minister <3". It's clear to anyone that these are 'fake', and I'd imagine it has the effect of making people thing that the conservatives are trying to artificially bolster his reputation.

“My” prime minister? Ew, we don’t do that here. That makes it sound 100% fake.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#210

Post by throwaway8255 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

ghoward wrote: post #130

ggggtez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mine probably got flagged, but not because of curse words or ALL CAPS because, as far as I remember, it didn't have either of them. Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?

Very likely :)