Over 170 Million Reviews Removed by Google from Maps and Search
Google has said it blocked or removed more than 170 million policy-violating reviews in Maps and search last year – using its new machine learning (ML) algorithm.
Last year, this new algorithm helped the tech giant remove 45 percent more fake reviews than the year before.
More than 12 million fake business profiles were also blocked, the company said.
“Last year, we released a new machine learning algorithm that identifies questionable review patterns even faster. It does this by examining long-term signals on a daily basis—for example, if a reviewer leaves the same review for multiple companies, or if a company experiences a sudden spike in one- or five-star reviews,” Google said in a blog post.
Additionally, the company said improvements to its video moderation algorithms — such as detecting fake duplicate phone numbers — helped it catch 14 million video violations in 2023 — up 7 million from the previous year.
Business owners were protected from more than 2 million hackers trying to claim business profiles that didn’t belong to them – more than 1 million more than in 2022.
Temporary protections were placed on more than 123,000 companies after the company’s systems detected suspicious activity and attempts at abuse, Google noted.
Last year, Google filed a lawsuit against a malicious actor who had published false reviews on Maps and fraudulently tried to manipulate the services of small businesses.
