On the other hand, a business owner has no other tool against review bombing except this. In a village near me a barber shop was review bombed by neo-nazis due to their support for refugees. They removed the fake reviews successfully but from time to time this Nazi scum remembers and review bomb them again. This goes on since at least 2020.

I recently had my own negative review removed from a crappy business and just checked this feature there:

Looks like it’s only semi useful as it only shows how many reviews have been removed in the last year while rating displays the total number of ratings throughout the years.

Hah, now I understand why all those 4.5+ places I went in Munich two years ago sucked.

While try to use Google stuff as rare as possible but that is really an great improvement. Finally makes reviews usable again.

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.

Mega feature. Wow, toilet burger in Leipzig has 10% removed... Yikes

I have no trust for Google, very much so for any of their adjusted ratings systems. Youtube, Maps, the Play Store, all heavily moderated against critical reviews, and especially flooded with NPC 5 star slop.

Somewhat related. I don't know how to deal with the cases where restaurants reward the customers to live 5 star reviews, like giving a free drinks for example

Duckduckgo