Google will penalize fake Maps reviews. People leave them because … they don’t like restrictions

It’s hard to disagree with the opinion that Google Maps has long ceased to be just an application that allows you to check the way to your destination. Now Maps is a treasure trove of knowledge. From the service level, we can, for example, view photos of another city and plan its visit, check fuel prices at some stations or find places (e.g. restaurants) worth recommending. Thousands of opinions of people who have already visited a given place help in this.

The problem is that not all opinions are honest and actually relate to the quality of service at a given point. And the false ones often quite strongly influence the assessment of the entrepreneur marked on Google Maps.

Google will penalize users who leave false reviews

As Google explains in its blog, the company is constantly developing its system for verifying reviews appearing in Maps and – as the giant announces – is also adapting its guidelines to the current global situation. And this, unfortunately, will be forced by the governments of most countries in the world to introduce local restrictions, such as limits on people who can enter restaurants, bars, cinemas or gyms or the need to present a vaccination certificate before entering the premises.

Obviously, a part of the society does not agree with the restrictions, which then spills their frustration on entrepreneurs who refuse to serve customers who do not meet the requirements. Google Maps (and not only) is flooded with (wrongly) negative opinions criticizing companies for complying with government restrictions. As a result, the average rating of a given premises in the application also drops.

As Google announced, the company is working intensively on searching and removing comments from people who do not like compliance with the restrictions related to the pandemic. In some cases, the Internet giant will block the accounts of users giving false reviews, and in extreme cases, even report the case to law enforcement authorities.

As the world changes, so do our rules and safeguards. This helps us protect places and entrepreneurs from aggressive and unrelated assessments when there is a risk that they will be the target of abuses. For example, when governments and companies begin requiring proof of vaccination before entering certain sites, we are introducing additional safeguards to remove reviews that criticize the company for its sanitation or adherence to vaccination laws.

– explains Google

Google explains how to find a fake review

In addition, the company explained how it searches for and verifies suspicious reviews. The first step is to scan user feedback content by artificial intelligence. The algorithm considers suspicious primarily opinions containing offensive and unrelated words and issued by people who have violated the rules in the past or who gave a lot of ratings in a short time.

If the AI ​​has no objection, the opinion is published and – if it is found to be harmful – then users can report it to Google. Comments that have not been automatically verified or have been reported by Internet users, are then sent to the company’s moderators, who check whether they comply with the rules.

As reported by the American company Yelp, which aggregates opinions on the Internet, in the period from April to December 2021, 15.5 thousand reviews were removed that violated the rules for publishing content related to the pandemic. It is over 160 percent. more than in the corresponding period of 2020. In total, in 2021, Yelp removed over 70,000. false reviews, and a significant part of them came from people who had never visited the assessed place.