UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

Post by ClumsyPilot » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 10:29 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #205

vasco wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resp…

Post by doix » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

3np wrote: post #164

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.

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…

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

ficklepickle wrote: post #213

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…

Imagine you operate in an industry where these reviews are not permitted. You have your regulator telling you to remove them with no means of actually achieving that. I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up "disavowing" the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can't set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.

Post by fakedang » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 2:09 PM 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.

Post by 3np » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

doix wrote: post #224

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…

I agree with you, but I can't in good conscience leave anything less than 5 stars for people working in the gig economy. As long as an Uber driver gets me to where I'm going and isn't driving recklessly I'll give them a 5 even though most of them should be a 3 (going by a linear system). There's no way I could mess with someone's livelihood like that.