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