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 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.