In 2021, more than 100 million fraudulent content was removed from Google Maps

With a noted increase in contributions on Google Maps in one year, the American giant Google has published a report on the techniques put in place to combat false reviews and fraudulent accounts that try to cheat the system. The company seeks to reassure and show the extent of its capabilities to control bad behavior on its platform.

Thanks to the joint effort of machine learning, dedicated teams and contributors, Google was able to remove 100 million fraudulent content from Maps in 2021.

Google Maps: vitally important for businesses

The service offered by the Mountain View giant has now become a very important factor to take into account for many companies, from the neighborhood bakery to the bodybuilder, through restaurants, or even factories or monuments. Each information and each opinion published in connection with its business can have a significant impact on its good health.

According to Google, every day, more than 20 million contributions are submitted by users: change of schedules, notices, telephone number… An increasing figure for the year 2021 with all the information related to the COVID to be specified. Multiply this figure to find the number of content posted in a year, and you get a hell of a lot of contributions with, of course, their share of fakes and attempted fraud. But Google wants to be reassuring and specifies that these frauds represented less than 1% of published content last year.

Google therefore spreads its record of the fight against this false information which abounds on Maps. Thanks to machine learning, more than 100 million fraudulent content created by Google Business accounts have been blocked. Bot activities are continuously analyzed and blocked automatically. 7 million fake profiles were identified and removed, and 12 million attempts to create fake business profiles were also blocked.

Necessary cooperation

With the global reopening of places welcoming visitors, millions of users rely on Google Maps to check the information of the places: dishes to take away or not, terrace available, opening hours, COVID protocol…

It is also partly because of this last point that users have tried, last year, to disseminate false reviews. An anti-sanitary measure turned away at the entrance to a restaurant will give it a bad review, when another person will undermine the reputation of a shop because the manager does not wear a mask, for example.

To begin to counter these actions, Google has set up protection for 100,000 companies (which is not much) and continues its work of analysis and blocking in parallel. 95 million ratings and reviews that violated Google Maps’ usage policy were blocked, of which Google says only 60,000 were directly related to COVID.

It is therefore a combined effort of technologies developed by Google, the company’s human teams and feedback from the user community that allows better and broader monitoring of fraudulent reviews and fake accounts that plague Google Maps. .

Sources: google
, BGR