Google Maps: more reliable evaluations thanks to the hunt for fake reviews


Stéphane Ficca

Hardware & gaming specialist

February 14, 2024 at 6:29 p.m.

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Google continues its fight against fake reviews © AngieYeoh/Shutterstock

Google continues its fight against fake reviews © AngieYeoh/Shutterstock

In 2023, Google has obviously put its teams to work to make the web an ever better world. This also involves a new machine learning algorithm, which allows the American giant to better detect fake reviews on Search and Maps.

Like many Internet users, you regularly rely on reviews left by customers when it comes to reserving a table at a restaurant, a room at a hotel or a pizza from the local truck. Every Google user is free to leave a review on a local business, in order to help the community.

Google steps up its hunt against fake reviews

In its latest 2023 report, Google indicates that it has collected around 20 million contributions per day on Maps and Search. These included updates on opening hours, ratings, photos, reviews, video…

However, in order to provide a reliable service (and not put certain businesses at risk), Google has developed a combination of technologies and qualified operators, with the aim of combating bad actors.

More than 170 million fake reviews blocked in 2023 © Google

More than 170 million fake reviews blocked in 2023 © Google

For the American giant, this includes slowing down the spread of “ fake review ”, so that community content remains useful and authentic for everyone.

Moderation, and a new learning algorithm

In addition to various moderation filters, it is a new machine learning algorithm that detects questionable review models even faster. This looks at longer-term signals on a daily basis, such as if a reviewer leaves the same review on multiple businesses or if a business receives a sudden spike in 1- or 5-star reviews.

In this way, during the year 2023, this new algorithm made it possible to eliminate no less than 45% more false reviews than the previous year, or more than 170 million false reviews.

Business owners were also protected against more than 2 million attempts by malicious actors to claim business profiles that did not belong to them. Again, this corresponds to an increase of more than a million compared to 2022.

Among the practices targeted by Google, that which consists, on the part of scammers, of offering low remuneration to Internet users in exchange for false reviews (1 star or 5 stars) and/or clicks on online advertisements. “ In just a few weeks, we detected over five million fake review attempts linked to this scam », Explains Google.

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Source : Search Engine Land



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