I've been constantly traveling for the past few months and after being burned with a few filthy "highly rated" hotels I resorted to constantly checking Google Maps to verify the scores... Enter Vietnam, where there's a million hotels and not a shred of credibility. Cross checking was taking far too much time so I built a browser extension to do it for me by adding a button on search results. I'm finding it useful so feel free to use it too!
Comments
leakycap•3mo ago
What are the key factors that your extension looks for to decide whether a review is real or fake?
deeteeess•3mo ago
Discrepancies in rating scores are flagged over various tolerances, with total number of reviews playing a small factor too. Google Maps is considered the source of truth.
leakycap•3mo ago
Interesting. I can see how those metrics could be arrived to, I'm just not sure how you are even remotely sure you're not throwing out good reviews and focusing on the fake ones.
I worked in an online marketing for a company that mostly served asian take-out restaurants and the competitive review-bombing, at least around here, was out of control - even on Google.
It might be better than the alternatives, but if you're seeing G Maps as truth you're taking a lot of fake reviews along for the ride.
I'm interested in this type of product, but have yet to see one that had a cogent way to separate the chaff from the wheat.
deeteeess•3mo ago
There is also a couple of other things being factored in, such as whether the hotel location has moved, but you're right, it requires deeper analysis of even just the account history of those leaving reviews. This is just a simple surface level tool evaluating the overall rating rather than assessing the quality of the individual reviews. I'm sure an LLM could help a lot here too however given this is a free extension and the google maps API is not cheap, it's fit for purpose in it's current state. I can envision more holistic cross checking across more service providers too - if demand suddenly jumps up (:D) I could probably do some affiliate link thing to keep it cost free for everyone while delivering a more thorough analysis. At the moment it's just leveraging the fact that it's a larger hurdle to sign up for Google than it is for Booking.com, so definitely not bullet or future proof
leakycap•3mo ago
deeteeess•3mo ago
leakycap•3mo ago
I worked in an online marketing for a company that mostly served asian take-out restaurants and the competitive review-bombing, at least around here, was out of control - even on Google.
It might be better than the alternatives, but if you're seeing G Maps as truth you're taking a lot of fake reviews along for the ride.
I'm interested in this type of product, but have yet to see one that had a cogent way to separate the chaff from the wheat.
deeteeess•3mo ago