Feuerfest

It seems that Google finally came to realize that Google Maps reviews are constantly becoming more useless. As people on Mastodon point out, Google now displays the amount of deleted reviews due to defamation directly under the overall score of an POI.

This is great! And will be a grim wake up call for some businesses. After all, the takedown of non-5-star reviews has become a whole industry of its own.

Sadly, I can't check some businesses on my own yet, as the feature seems to be rolled out in waves and I don't see this information yet. However, in this Mastodon thread there are some screenshots.

EDIT: Now I'm able to see the information about deleted reviews. The number is given in ranges (1, 2-5, 6-10, 11-20, 21-50, 51-100, 101-150, etc.) and is only about reviews deleted in the past 12 months.

This screenshot for example shows that over 250 reviews have been deleted.

Many subreddits for towns already have lists with restaurants with the most/least removed reviews. And sometimes it's really eye-opening.