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I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was

I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was not there. I waited an hour and checked. Then a couple hours and checked. Then a day. It never showed up. I posted the review under her account and did the same checks for my account. It never showed up. I do not know why it didn't show up, but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam. Edit: Because some commenters did not seem to get the implied message, what I am actually implying is that in this context, or any context, I don't trust Google. I have no evidence of what commenters said I have claimed. (I have not claimed anything; I just said I wouldn't be surprised.)

ipsum2 6y ago
> but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam. Do you have any evidence of this claim? Have you seen businesses be able to do that? Surely, the hundreds of thousands of businesses on Google, one of them has talked about the ability to remove reviews.
- donaldo 6y ago
  Yeah agreed. Do they think Google just has some checkout button to block bad reviews for $299.
  - zaphirplane 6y ago
    Of course not, you need to be logged in to a google account and solve a captcha ;)
- ghoward 6y ago
  Nope. No evidence. That's why I said that "I would not be surprised if..." which doesn't make a concrete claim. To me, it means, "I don't know, but it seems plausible in my limited experience." I am making no claim other than pure speculation, and I know it. Edit: typo.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. You'd think if it were possible, someone would have written a howto guide. Personally, I'm deeply skeptical that any such mechanism exists. The revenue it would generate would be negligible and the potential for reputation loss significant.
- tines 6y ago
  > There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. And you used Google search to look for it, right? ... (Kidding.)
- liaukovv 6y ago
  There is probably a button for business owner to complain about a review, for example in case of competitor bombing? Since nothing on google can be appealed this button is as good as removal of reviews at will And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Again, I can't find even a hint of how to do this on the internet. If there is a way, you'd expect it to be documented given what surely must be widespread interest in the subject. Basically what we have here is an entirely unsubstantiated and unlikely accusation. (Unlikely because the incentives simply are not aligned.)
    - ghoward 6y ago
      Saying "I wouldn't be surprised if..." is not an accusation, unless you count the implied "I don't trust Google" as an accusation.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        If you said of someone, "I wouldn't be surprised if they were a thief," that would rightly be viewed as a pseudo-accusation of thievery or other dishonesty. It doesn't literally mean the same thing as "he is a thief," but saying you believe someone has a decent chance of being a thief is still a type of accusation -- one of dishonesty and distrust. If the belief is unjustified, then I think it's fair to call it an unsubstantiated accusation. But if that doesn't work for you, pretend I called it an unsubstantiated implication instead. Either way, I think we all understood what the OP meant, and we all understood what I meant in my response. So at least we are communicating.
Laremere 6y ago
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" Given how well known other unscrupulous review service tactics are (eg, yelp) I doubt this would be the case. It's hard to keep such practices secret when they involve attempting to extract money from a large number of businesses. Plus Google seems to be reasonably honest about labeling (even if very subtly) when things are sponsored ads or not. I would find it far more likely that this is simply a symptom of something Google is well known for doing: Content moderation through algorithms/ML which mostly works but still messes up a lot. Either the wording of the review hit some metric on its own, or the business already was detected as being review bombed and your review got caught in the cleanup crossfire. Posting it twice probably didn't help, as that would further convince an algorithm it's probably not legitimate.
- ghoward 6y ago
  I agree. That's why I said "I wouldn't be surprised if..." I intentionally did not make a concrete claim.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Hmm, that's interesting. If I was writing a review moderation algorithm, it would leave only one copy up if there were multiple substantially identical reviews. Those are likely to be written by bots that mutate a common review and post, or even if some entity circulates a "review" to its crew of minions who write fake reviews based on that template. I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.
- amelius 6y ago
  How does "stupidity" explain that the poster's account showed the review but someone else's account didn't?
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
rorykoehler 6y ago
If the business is an Adwords customer then there is a conflict of interest.
HenryBemis 6y ago
I stayed in a hotel in Rotterdam one time (5-6 years ago). The entrance had a ramp for wheelchairs/prams. A bunch of a*holes parked their luxury cars blocking that ramp. On the second morning the cars were still there I called the concierge out to see this. Then I took a picture of him, of the cars, and their plates and told him I will call the Police in 5mins (yes I am THAT kind of guy). In two minutes all cars were gone never to reappear (I stayed there 10 days). I left a 1star review to the hotel, under my name, with photos of the cars (not their plates) and a comment about blocking the ramp, hotel staff was informed multiple times and didn't react. I went to Rotterdam again 1 year ago. My review was still there. A half-baked apology was under my comment. I walked by, no cars were blocking the ramps. I call that a win.
- 1000mA 6y ago
  I bet you love to threaten calling the police on people. PoS bootlicker, kill yourself.
phr4ts 6y ago
The same happened to me. The negative review shows up when i'm signed in but it did not affect the rating (number of stars) of the business. Basically, it's just me and the owner of the business that sees the review. The negative review I gave the scammy business doesn't show up when I sign out.
arkitaip 6y ago
Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for a random dinky business to bribe an engineer at Google? There are businesses that are literally making bank for Google and still can't get in touch with a human being at Google when their Google account gets locked, app gets removed from the Play Store, etc. What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghoward 6y ago
  The reason I am hesitant to believe that is because of the fact that the review _never_ showed up, not even briefly. However, you could still be right.
- liveoneggs 6y ago
  yeah but what about yext and friends getting special access for their clients?
ThorAway00 6y ago
Throwaway for obvious reasons: While working for a big vacation rental company in Portland not named Airbnb, they rolled out a review update that still added negative reviews to the 5 star score, but hid the context. A rental may have a lowered star rating but the only story you’d see was praise. Business is not about logic like engineering. It’s about growing margins, and that is entirely emotional.
hayst4ck 6y ago
I am no google fanboy, but I WOULD be surprised to find such a thing. The reason I would be surprised is history and alignment. Google consistently has bad/non existent customer service It is famously hard to talk to a google employee when you have a problem Google has a history of primarily hiring devs Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results Google probably has the largest most experienced anti-SEO team on the earth Google seems to want to stay out of the press Google maps reviews are a very major competitive moat against other maps Google is supported by ads, but AFAIK does not actively seek customers Google does not do delivery Google's money maker is getting information, maps is a major input Maps is a secondary business able to be subsidized by search ad revenue On the counter side Inflated reviews/advantaged reviews would make ad customers happy Selling position is potentially extremely profitable I just don't see it. It's not googles MO. It's yelps MO. That's why I use google maps as my primary tool for finding whats good. What I wouldn't be surprised by is google systemically limiting negative reviews. In my experience A yelp 3.5 would be a 4 on google maps. A yelp 1 or 2 would be a 3 on google maps. 4 would be 4.5 on google maps. Google maps numbers are definitely inflated, but once you understand the relative scale it's just as good as pre-corrupt Yelp.
- ghoward 6y ago
  This is a great reply to my post and answers me better than any of the others I have seen thus far.
  - alert0 6y ago
    Any curse words or something that a system might flag?
    - ghoward 6y ago
      No, I actually do not swear at all.
      - beckman466 6y ago
        Wow, a real life saint ;)
trollski 6y ago
it's like commenting on hackernews for me. which you will never hear about.
- dang 6y ago
  It's not, because: (1) Anyone can easily see why you're banned, if they want to turn 'showdead' on in their profile and look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski ; (2) Anyone can easily get an answer about why they're banned on HN, simply by asking us; (3) Anyone can easily get themselves unbanned on HN if they want to use the site in the intended spirit as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
thehappypm 6y ago
It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something. Maybe that business was caught buying reviews and so Google stopped allowing new ones for a while. Or it reported it was getting spammed. Or some other situation like that.
- ghoward 6y ago
  This is a very good alternative explanation. Thank you.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  >It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something I doubt google is investigating each bad review they receive, though, so it happening to both accounts is odd.
choppaface 6y ago
I've had the exact same experience. Several days later I got an email from Google saying the review was now live, but it's still not there. Other reviews that I wrote years ago are hidden, too.
ggggtez 6y ago
Here is my reading of your situation: 1) You posted a review which presumably got flagged as being spam/low-quality (maybe an automated system flagged it for having ALL CAPS or curse words, or who knows what). 2) You posted the same review on a different account, which now is flagged as double spam because now it looks like you are operating a sock-puppet account. I think my version of events sounds a lot more likely than yours. If your thing was true, then you could sign up right now with your own fake business and find the page where you can remove reviews of your own business. Since no one has shown this to happen, one can only assume that it doesn't happen. I think Google/Amazon etc try to mostly remove fake reviews, and that probably just catches reviewers who are giving 1 star angry-rants as "spam".
- ghoward 6y ago
  Mine probably got flagged, but not because of curse words or ALL CAPS because, as far as I remember, it didn't have either of them. Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?
  - throwaway8255 6y ago
    Very likely :)
throwaway_1301 6y ago
disclaimer: Google employee. Views my own. You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible. If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess. Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.
- ghoward 6y ago
  Note that I didn't say Google let businesses pay for reviews; all I said was that "I wouldn't be surprised" if Google let businesses do the spam filtering and flag reviews. What I really meant is that I don't trust Google in this situation. That lack of trust still exists and is not a conspiracy. And I _would_ be surprised if Google actually did the right thing here.
  - throwaway_1301 6y ago
    So all of your statements basically say that you think Google reviews are pay to play because you dont trust them to do something right. Sure, you have the right to that opinion.
- fakedang 6y ago
  I can pay external farms to spawn new favorable reviews though, and Google won't do shit.
chrischen 6y ago
I'm not sure if Google does it indirectly, but they definitely do this practice with their "partners" (probably just a convenient way to shift liability of more shady practices) to review partners like Trustpilot (I get their sales calls all the time, so I know what benefits they offer to businesses in terms of "moderating" reviews).
wyqydsyq 6y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam. I would be really surprised, as such a scheme existing without being exposed by now seems highly unlikely, and it would completely undermine the value of Google Maps reviews once everyone knows businesses can freely curate their reviews. Why would you bother looking up reviews for a business if you already knew any legitimate negative ones would be censored out? You wouldn't. Nobody would. Reviews on Google Maps would be discontinued by now if it were ever the case.
retox 6y ago
Try leaving a positive review from another account.

ipsum2 6y ago

> but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam. Do you have any evidence of this claim? Have you seen businesses be able to do that? Surely, the hundreds of thousands of businesses on Google, one of them has talked about the ability to remove reviews.

donaldo 6y ago
Yeah agreed. Do they think Google just has some checkout button to block bad reviews for $299.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  Of course not, you need to be logged in to a google account and solve a captcha ;)
ghoward 6y ago
Nope. No evidence. That's why I said that "I would not be surprised if..." which doesn't make a concrete claim. To me, it means, "I don't know, but it seems plausible in my limited experience." I am making no claim other than pure speculation, and I know it. Edit: typo.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. You'd think if it were possible, someone would have written a howto guide. Personally, I'm deeply skeptical that any such mechanism exists. The revenue it would generate would be negligible and the potential for reputation loss significant.

tines 6y ago
> There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. And you used Google search to look for it, right? ... (Kidding.)
liaukovv 6y ago
There is probably a button for business owner to complain about a review, for example in case of competitor bombing? Since nothing on google can be appealed this button is as good as removal of reviews at will And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Again, I can't find even a hint of how to do this on the internet. If there is a way, you'd expect it to be documented given what surely must be widespread interest in the subject. Basically what we have here is an entirely unsubstantiated and unlikely accusation. (Unlikely because the incentives simply are not aligned.)
  - ghoward 6y ago
    Saying "I wouldn't be surprised if..." is not an accusation, unless you count the implied "I don't trust Google" as an accusation.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      If you said of someone, "I wouldn't be surprised if they were a thief," that would rightly be viewed as a pseudo-accusation of thievery or other dishonesty. It doesn't literally mean the same thing as "he is a thief," but saying you believe someone has a decent chance of being a thief is still a type of accusation -- one of dishonesty and distrust. If the belief is unjustified, then I think it's fair to call it an unsubstantiated accusation. But if that doesn't work for you, pretend I called it an unsubstantiated implication instead. Either way, I think we all understood what the OP meant, and we all understood what I meant in my response. So at least we are communicating.

Laremere 6y ago

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" Given how well known other unscrupulous review service tactics are (eg, yelp) I doubt this would be the case. It's hard to keep such practices secret when they involve attempting to extract money from a large number of businesses. Plus Google seems to be reasonably honest about labeling (even if very subtly) when things are sponsored ads or not. I would find it far more likely that this is simply a symptom of something Google is well known for doing: Content moderation through algorithms/ML which mostly works but still messes up a lot. Either the wording of the review hit some metric on its own, or the business already was detected as being review bombed and your review got caught in the cleanup crossfire. Posting it twice probably didn't help, as that would further convince an algorithm it's probably not legitimate.

ghoward 6y ago
I agree. That's why I said "I wouldn't be surprised if..." I intentionally did not make a concrete claim.
WalterBright 6y ago
Hmm, that's interesting. If I was writing a review moderation algorithm, it would leave only one copy up if there were multiple substantially identical reviews. Those are likely to be written by bots that mutate a common review and post, or even if some entity circulates a "review" to its crew of minions who write fake reviews based on that template. I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.
amelius 6y ago
How does "stupidity" explain that the poster's account showed the review but someone else's account didn't?
- nitrogen 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

rorykoehler 6y ago

If the business is an Adwords customer then there is a conflict of interest.

HenryBemis 6y ago

I stayed in a hotel in Rotterdam one time (5-6 years ago). The entrance had a ramp for wheelchairs/prams. A bunch of a*holes parked their luxury cars blocking that ramp. On the second morning the cars were still there I called the concierge out to see this. Then I took a picture of him, of the cars, and their plates and told him I will call the Police in 5mins (yes I am THAT kind of guy). In two minutes all cars were gone never to reappear (I stayed there 10 days). I left a 1star review to the hotel, under my name, with photos of the cars (not their plates) and a comment about blocking the ramp, hotel staff was informed multiple times and didn't react. I went to Rotterdam again 1 year ago. My review was still there. A half-baked apology was under my comment. I walked by, no cars were blocking the ramps. I call that a win.

1000mA 6y ago
I bet you love to threaten calling the police on people. PoS bootlicker, kill yourself.

phr4ts 6y ago

The same happened to me. The negative review shows up when i'm signed in but it did not affect the rating (number of stars) of the business. Basically, it's just me and the owner of the business that sees the review. The negative review I gave the scammy business doesn't show up when I sign out.

arkitaip 6y ago

Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for a random dinky business to bribe an engineer at Google? There are businesses that are literally making bank for Google and still can't get in touch with a human being at Google when their Google account gets locked, app gets removed from the Play Store, etc. What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghoward 6y ago
The reason I am hesitant to believe that is because of the fact that the review _never_ showed up, not even briefly. However, you could still be right.
liveoneggs 6y ago
yeah but what about yext and friends getting special access for their clients?

ThorAway00 6y ago

Throwaway for obvious reasons: While working for a big vacation rental company in Portland not named Airbnb, they rolled out a review update that still added negative reviews to the 5 star score, but hid the context. A rental may have a lowered star rating but the only story you’d see was praise. Business is not about logic like engineering. It’s about growing margins, and that is entirely emotional.

hayst4ck 6y ago

I am no google fanboy, but I WOULD be surprised to find such a thing. The reason I would be surprised is history and alignment. Google consistently has bad/non existent customer service It is famously hard to talk to a google employee when you have a problem Google has a history of primarily hiring devs Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results Google probably has the largest most experienced anti-SEO team on the earth Google seems to want to stay out of the press Google maps reviews are a very major competitive moat against other maps Google is supported by ads, but AFAIK does not actively seek customers Google does not do delivery Google's money maker is getting information, maps is a major input Maps is a secondary business able to be subsidized by search ad revenue On the counter side Inflated reviews/advantaged reviews would make ad customers happy Selling position is potentially extremely profitable I just don't see it. It's not googles MO. It's yelps MO. That's why I use google maps as my primary tool for finding whats good. What I wouldn't be surprised by is google systemically limiting negative reviews. In my experience A yelp 3.5 would be a 4 on google maps. A yelp 1 or 2 would be a 3 on google maps. 4 would be 4.5 on google maps. Google maps numbers are definitely inflated, but once you understand the relative scale it's just as good as pre-corrupt Yelp.

ghoward 6y ago
This is a great reply to my post and answers me better than any of the others I have seen thus far.
- alert0 6y ago
  Any curse words or something that a system might flag?
  - ghoward 6y ago
    No, I actually do not swear at all.
    - beckman466 6y ago
      Wow, a real life saint ;)

trollski 6y ago

it's like commenting on hackernews for me. which you will never hear about.

dang 6y ago
It's not, because: (1) Anyone can easily see why you're banned, if they want to turn 'showdead' on in their profile and look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski ; (2) Anyone can easily get an answer about why they're banned on HN, simply by asking us; (3) Anyone can easily get themselves unbanned on HN if they want to use the site in the intended spirit as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

thehappypm 6y ago

It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something. Maybe that business was caught buying reviews and so Google stopped allowing new ones for a while. Or it reported it was getting spammed. Or some other situation like that.

ghoward 6y ago
This is a very good alternative explanation. Thank you.
LegitShady 6y ago
>It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something I doubt google is investigating each bad review they receive, though, so it happening to both accounts is odd.

choppaface 6y ago

I've had the exact same experience. Several days later I got an email from Google saying the review was now live, but it's still not there. Other reviews that I wrote years ago are hidden, too.

ggggtez 6y ago

Here is my reading of your situation: 1) You posted a review which presumably got flagged as being spam/low-quality (maybe an automated system flagged it for having ALL CAPS or curse words, or who knows what). 2) You posted the same review on a different account, which now is flagged as double spam because now it looks like you are operating a sock-puppet account. I think my version of events sounds a lot more likely than yours. If your thing was true, then you could sign up right now with your own fake business and find the page where you can remove reviews of your own business. Since no one has shown this to happen, one can only assume that it doesn't happen. I think Google/Amazon etc try to mostly remove fake reviews, and that probably just catches reviewers who are giving 1 star angry-rants as "spam".

ghoward 6y ago
Mine probably got flagged, but not because of curse words or ALL CAPS because, as far as I remember, it didn't have either of them. Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?
- throwaway8255 6y ago
  Very likely :)

throwaway_1301 6y ago

disclaimer: Google employee. Views my own. You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible. If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess. Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.

ghoward 6y ago
Note that I didn't say Google let businesses pay for reviews; all I said was that "I wouldn't be surprised" if Google let businesses do the spam filtering and flag reviews. What I really meant is that I don't trust Google in this situation. That lack of trust still exists and is not a conspiracy. And I _would_ be surprised if Google actually did the right thing here.
- throwaway_1301 6y ago
  So all of your statements basically say that you think Google reviews are pay to play because you dont trust them to do something right. Sure, you have the right to that opinion.
fakedang 6y ago
I can pay external farms to spawn new favorable reviews though, and Google won't do shit.

chrischen 6y ago

I'm not sure if Google does it indirectly, but they definitely do this practice with their "partners" (probably just a convenient way to shift liability of more shady practices) to review partners like Trustpilot (I get their sales calls all the time, so I know what benefits they offer to businesses in terms of "moderating" reviews).

wyqydsyq 6y ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam. I would be really surprised, as such a scheme existing without being exposed by now seems highly unlikely, and it would completely undermine the value of Google Maps reviews once everyone knows businesses can freely curate their reviews. Why would you bother looking up reviews for a business if you already knew any legitimate negative ones would be censored out? You wouldn't. Nobody would. Reviews on Google Maps would be discontinued by now if it were ever the case.

retox 6y ago

Try leaving a positive review from another account.