As some of you may know, Germany has one of the shittiest “defamation” code that allows any business owner to simply delete the reviews they don’t like. For a long time this had made Google Maps ranking useless: a rating of 4.9 could mean the store is really good, or it’s deleting all the bad reviews.

Not anymore.

Now if you click through all the way to the Reviews tab, Maps will tell you how many reviews the business owner has deleted in the past year.

So when choosing where to have lunch, don’t forget to check this tab. Also check the places you usually go: restaurants, stores, car mechanics. Chances are if they’re doing this you should look somewhere else.

  • Waldelfe@feddit.org
    8·
    2 天前

    I stopped using Google reviews because it’s absolutely pointless with the deleted reviews. So far I’ve had almost all of my bad reviews removed, even though I always write an honest description of why the food or service was bad. There are some really bad restaurants in my city that regularly go down to 1,x before they remove all bad reviews and it jumps to 4,x again for a while.

    The problem is that public ratings will just never be useful. Either you have owners that delete all the bad reviews, or you don’t let them delete and good businesses can be review bombed for petty reasons.

  • LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de
    481·
    3 天前

    On the other hand, a business owner has no other tool against review bombing except this. In a village near me a barber shop was review bombed by neo-nazis due to their support for refugees. They removed the fake reviews successfully but from time to time this Nazi scum remembers and review bomb them again. This goes on since at least 2020.

    • hades@feddit.ukOP
      17·
      3 天前

      To be clear, this isn’t about reporting reviews to Google in general, which is possible in any country. This is specifically about the fast-tracked “defamation” process in Germany.

      And they are not removing this process, they are merely adding transparency.

    • Aniki@feddit.org
      21·
      3 天前

      well, if the review says “this owner is shit because they support refugees”, that in itself says something.

      • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
        31·
        3 天前

        That’s not really how it works with bad faith review bombing. When they’re just actively trying to tank the business by any means possible, it’ll be just actual lies. “Terrible haircut,” “Rats everywhere,” “Cut me and I was covered in blood,” etc.

    • spiffmeister@aussie.zone
      5·
      2 天前

      Yeah the ratings for things in Munich are absolute bullshit. I find it better to check Reddit posts than google ratings.

  • Pechente@feddit.org
    35·
    3 天前

    I recently had my own negative review removed from a crappy business and just checked this feature there:

    Looks like it’s only semi useful as it only shows how many reviews have been removed in the last year while rating displays the total number of ratings throughout the years.

    • hades@feddit.ukOP
      7·
      3 天前

      Correct. To be honest, for me any non zero amount is an immediate huge red flag.

    • Ardor von Heersburg@discuss.tchncs.de
      31·
      3 天前

      The ‘x to x’ form they use makes me think that they might plan to use an annual average in the future, but have only just started collecting the data?

      Just an idea but it would make sense to me.

  • cookiecoookie@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 天前

    I have no trust for Google, very much so for any of their adjusted ratings systems. Youtube, Maps, the Play Store, all heavily moderated against critical reviews, and especially flooded with NPC 5 star slop.

  • romanticremedy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    2 天前

    Somewhat related. I don’t know how to deal with the cases where restaurants reward the customers to live 5 star reviews, like giving a free drinks for example