Google Might Be Hiding the Fact That Its Own Reviews Are Shoddy (yahoo.com) 13
Google appears to have quietly purged its own user-generated review content from its search results. From a report: This is significant, critics of Google say, because it obscures the fact that Google's search engine judges the company's own reviews poorly. Google's search engine ranks content by relevance and quality, and Google's review content previously showed up deep into the search results, far from the first page of links that takes most of the clicks. A Google spokesperson disagreed that the review content was "de-indexed," simply noting that because Google reviews don't currently live on a web page, they are not displayed as web results.
Given that reviews once showed up in regular Google search results and now do not, it follows that the reviews were moved from a web page to the Maps platform, whose code prevents search engines from crawling it. What was once searchable is now not searchable, something Google did not explain. As a result, Google reviews do not have to rank highly in search engines. Instead, the Google snippet -- the map and reviews box above the standard search result -- allows the company to capture clicks that would otherwise flow off the platform to whatever website had the best result in the algorithm made by the search team down the hall at Mountain View deemed as the best.
Given that reviews once showed up in regular Google search results and now do not, it follows that the reviews were moved from a web page to the Maps platform, whose code prevents search engines from crawling it. What was once searchable is now not searchable, something Google did not explain. As a result, Google reviews do not have to rank highly in search engines. Instead, the Google snippet -- the map and reviews box above the standard search result -- allows the company to capture clicks that would otherwise flow off the platform to whatever website had the best result in the algorithm made by the search team down the hall at Mountain View deemed as the best.
Who knew? (Score:2)
No explanation is needed (Score:5, Interesting)
What needs explaining? Google wanted its review content to not be scraped by every two-bit fly-by-night review aggregator out there, so they took their content away and hid it in maps. They've been pushing their maps contributions feature especially hard lately; if you have location history enabled, you get a request to review pretty much every place you've been. Obviously they are hard up for content for that feature.
An explanation is needed (Score:1)
The summary doesn't do a very good job of explaining what is a "Google review". I had to go to TFA to understand what it's about!
So I'll spoil it : a "Google review" is a review on Google Maps of a particular place like hotel, restaurant or chiropractor. (if you're like me you'll look at joke reviews of places like concentration camps)
This for non Google users, if there are a few left on this board.
I do google map reviews all the time... (Score:1)
msmash (Score:5, Insightful)
Did an early version of AI write this shit?
Review of Google Support for Chromebooks (Score:1)
Didn't know where to put this on any "map", but I needed support to create a re-install SD card for my chromebook. I only have Linux. The people on the google forum page for chromebooks kept trying to tell me to use a Windows PC. I don't have a Windows PC. They told me to borrow one.
Unacceptable.
Creating a boot USB/SDHC device **is** 100% supported by Google. I'd found the page describing how to do it, but it wasn't working.
The google support people chose what they thought was the best answer and close
Obligatory xkcd quote (Score:2)
Clear manipulation (Score:2)
Clearly Google is manipulating search results by (checks notes) demoting their own results in the rankings.