How good of a Local Guide are you?

@MortenCopenhagen

I just learned thatand unfortunately this application cannot be shared :disappointed: .

Thanks for clearing this up, @Irfan_dPriyanto

Cheers

Morten

Hi @Melissa_Langlois

You really put me at work here! To understand what was going on I went back and tried to simplify or automate how we can find our hidden reviews. I managed to edit or remove some of my private reviews so now I only have 3 out of 533 = 0.6% of my reviews marked private. When I wrote the opening post a few days back 12 (2.2%) out of 539 were private. By accident, a few of my public reviews also got deleted.

I’m sharing this because during the clean up I noticed two issues that might be related to your issue.

  1. Sometimes the list of reviews is not complete while scrolling to the end on a desktop. The ones that are missing are from other regions (fra from where I live). So we might need to reload the page a few times to make sure the list is complete.

  2. I saw there is a delay in getting the number of reviews (public and private) updated on Google Maps. This is probably just the usual issue. We have to let the servers synchronize for a minimum of 24 hours.

So reloading and waiting for servers to synchronize are issues that are new for me and hence not shared in the opening post.

Now to your specific problem, that could be due to what I mentioned above.

You reported:

  1. Hidden reviews 8 % ( 20/248 ) it’s big, I’ll have to clean that up.

  2. Hidden photos 2.25 % ( 20/844 )

  3. Hidden ratings 0 % ( 0/4 )

  4. Average views per photo 4014 ( 3 388 3011/844 )

I think you have a typo where I underlined.

When I now look at your stats I find the following:

  1. Hidden reviews 248 - 243 = 5 hidden. That is 2.0 %

  2. Hidden photos 825 photos + 29 videos = 854 - 844 = 10 hidden pics This is only 1.2%

  3. Hidden ratings 0 % ( 0/4 ) (no change)

  4. Average views per photo 3.398.623 / 844 = 4027 views/pic (your total view count went up since yesterday)

(PS I edited the above to reflect that video should be included in the total private count).

So you managed to eliminate 20 - 5 = 15 hidden reviews. That is pretty good.

Regarding not being able to find the last 5 hidden reviews. I exactly the same challenge that I’m facing. And I don’t know what is going on. So I don’t have an answer for you. My suspicion would be that these could be reviews that we have given to places that have gone out of business. And Google decided to let them count in our favor although we can see them on our list of contributions anymore.

But is could also jest be the delay in synchronizing that is affecting these stats. So we will need to check again in a couple of days.

Let me know if this is helpful and or if you have other ideas. Or questions.

Cheers

Hi @C_T

I would love to know if you have some further input on the issue and explanations in this reply to @Melissa_Langlois .

Cheers

Hello @MortenCopenhagen

I find the stats of @Melissa_Langlois as

Public Private Hidden % Hidden/ Private
Reviews 243 248 5 2.1%
Ratings 4 4 0 0.0%
Photos + Videos 844 854 10 1.2%

While considering the photos we need counting the photos + videos together. That answers the discrepancy.

Thanks a million, @C_T .

After learning that the private videos need to be added to the private photos before comparing with the public count of photo+videos I had to redo my opening post including adjusting the screenshots. It took some time.

One comment on your calculation re # of hidden reviews:

You calculated 2.1% by this formula 5 * 100% / 234. Where 234 is the public count of reviews. In my view it needs to be 5 * 100% / 248. Where 248 is the private count of reviews. The 5 are not part of the 234 but in the 248 so the percentage needs to be calculated on the private review count. The result is then correctly 2.0%.

But this is for sure a minor detail.

Cheers

@MortenCopenhagen and @C_T Thanks for the explanation. I like this conversation a lot. It’s very informative and challenging. I like the opportunity it given me to strive to be a better guide all the while understanding more about the program and how some reviews are private.

@Melissa_Langlois

Thanks so much for your positive feedback.

Always happy to help.

Hello @MortenCopenhagen ,

nice Post, also I did already know this, as about 3 years ago there was a post like this. I think it was @Briggs .

In fact I would love to share my numbers, but something is wrong with my hidden view. It is exactly the same, but this is not possible. I have about 1-2 % not shown. I come back to you, when I have figured it out.

Hi @MortenCopenhagen

this is interesting or. I have no difference ONLY in the point :wink:

You see what I mean? I tried it as well with different computers…

Interesting, @TorM

Look here what I see on your profile:

I see the same number of pics independent of incognito or not. But my number is 41.672 while yours is 43.256.

I have no idea what is going on. But I know this much 43.256 - 41.672 = 1.584. Which is 3.7%. But I have no idea if this has any validity. I wonder if @sonnyNg would care to take a look.

Cheers.

Hello @MortenCopenhagen

okay, at least your number is fine for me. I did know that I have a quite high loss of pictures (in fact not such high) but I don’t care about this. There are several reasons:

  1. Remember that my main contribution is in a country called Germany. Here is a very interesting approach about privacy. I receive about once per month a call from people who ask me to delete a photo otherwise an lawyer will contact me :wink: This is the reason why I open communicate my name.

  2. If you have such a high amount of pictures in a long ran, than in the mean time there are many stores closed. I know a street in Krakow where within 2 years nearly all stores has closed and reopened under a new name. This pictures are lost. Average turn over of small shops is 10% per year.

  3. I find a lot of duplicates of places. Some month ago there was no option to say what the other duplicate POI is. So I used in this time to post the picture on both, with the hope that Google will find in this way the right place close by.

  4. For hotels is very difficult to get a picture published. I sleep in many different hotels. Most of my hotel pictures are not shown. I’m not sure if this is any pattern, but it is in this way.

  5. I sometimes do edit a picture for a place very much and do as well upload the original. After some days I see what picture is best positioned and delete the low performance picture. Some of them are not published.

  6. I face an issue with the timeline. Only on iOS I have the feedback double upload. I don’t have this on Android. In the past I saw double uploads because I scrolled down in the history and they where together. Now they are no more together and I can’t remember all… Double pictures are not shown.

  7. What is more interesting. (I will search for you!) I have some unpublished pictures, but they have a very high view rate. I did search some years ago and found them on Russian web sides and in public travel diaries of private people with a information about my name and source Google, but they where not visual under this POI. In this time I made a document about this, but changed the computer and missed to transfer this.

  8. I did several (over 1000 photo uploads) within the last weeks. I discovered that many of them are not published, but since some days appearing step by step, like the edits from this time.

So, I believe I could find more reasons, but maybe this is enough. And important side note. This is my private experience and I don’t know if this is related to normal Google technology :wink:

Thanks, @TorM , for this very nice list of explanations of why photos get hidden. Much appreciated.

I think we have fooled our selves and not checked your numbers in an optimal way. Today I see this:

According to this, you have (43.284 + 54 - 41.697) * 100% / (43.284 + 54) = 3.79% hidden.

So today I don’t think there is anything wrong with the stats on your profile. Yesterday, I find not look up your stats correctly. I think the mystery is solved. You should be able to reproduce the image above in an incognito window.

Cheers

Interesting stats, @MortenCopenhagen . Thanks for sharing it.

I tried to look at my own contributions, here’s what I’ve got:

Reviews: 230 / 233 = 99%

Photos/videos 735 / 744 = 99%

Views per public photos: 904,851 / 735 = 1231.

I only doubt whether it’s better to count average views with all photos/videos, as we don’t know when a photo became private.

I wish we could see which reviews and photos are private to make regular clean-ups and consider possible improvements of the contributions.

By the way, I seem to have noticed a curious thing. I checked the stats some time ago (just didn’t have time to share it here) and I had less private photos. Later, I reported numerous photos of other users that were not related to the places. After that, I found out that at least one my photo to one of those places became private - it was not shown in the place profile. It’s curious that a similar photo of another user but less informative was left there while mine was hidden.

Hi @YuliiaZa

Nice to see your stats. There seems to be room for improvements in average views per pic.

Whether the percent of hidden pics is calculated based on the private or public count is not very important. The percent will not change much. I recommend using the private count since deleting hidden pics will then improve your average view count by a tiny bit.

I think it is unrelated that one more pic god flagged hidden as you reported some other photos. But, there might be ill-minded local guides who try to harm others by flagging with no proper reason. If you have evidence you can ask one of the Google Moderators to reach out to you in private and they can investigate. But I’m afraid it will be difficult to prove it.

Cheers

Morten

Just noticed that missed a figure. The average number of views is 1231, not 123. Can’t help pointing this out, for it won’t go for a computational error :smile: Corrected it in the previous comment.

Absolutely - better to count with all photos included not just visible, that was my thought (apparently not worded properly).

As for the hidden picture, I don’t think it was a malicious act. What I thought is that moderators had checked all the pictures for that object (they were not so many). And if I think my photo is better than some others, it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody else has the same view).

Glad to see this post getting some attention again @MortenCopenhagen After posting last month I decided to go thru everything I could to see what I could clean up. I found 12 POI’s that had gone out of business so they and accompanying photos were removed.Your right it takes a lot of time to go thru your older reviews and photos. I removed some lesser quality photos and I removed some what I call under achieving photos ( meaning photos that were a year or older and had maybe 30 views I removed, they are taking up space and no one is viewing them)

Initially my point values dropped down almost 600 points. It didn’t matter,I felt I had cleaned up my reviewing process.

Below is a recap of last months numbers vs today’s:

May Private Public # %

Reviews 955 894 59 5.6%

Photos& Vids 3631 3557 74 2.6%

Ratings 5 5 0 0

Average Views per photos 11,953

Today

Reviews 1012 989 23 2.3%

Photos & Vids. 3690 3662 38 1.4%

Ratings 1 1 0 0 ( I will find it)

Average Views per photos 13,869

So yes i did a large clean up and am very happy about it and will continue to find the rest.

My average views per photos is still steadily increasing and I can attribute it to the fact that approximately 25% of MY reviews are have one of my photos as their featured photo. I am going to write a post on how to help others try and get their photo as the Featured photo.

Hi @TerryPG

Happy to see how you approach keeping your profile clean. Great job.

As the average view count increase with time, it is still an impressive jump your cleaning efforts resulted in. I plan to remove underperforming pics also when I find the time to do it.

What method did you use to identify your hidden reviews?

Good luck finding the remaining star-only rating. I wish we had some tools to help us find star-only ratings, hidden reviews, and pics. I have and idea, but it’s not sufficiently ripe yet.

Cheers

Morten

@MortenCopenhagen I tried doing it this way and it helped. Like your initial approach I opened on my desktop my google guides maps and a second one under the incognito view. I also opened a 3rd window for google searches if needed. I am using a 36 inch T.V as my desktop monitor , which helps. You could never do this on a phone. Like your Facebook friend suggested I scrolled down to the oldest reviews I had IN both screens, till I reached the oldest and then I worked backwards. Doing this and deleting doesn’t send you back to the beginning. You can work backwards. If I couldn’t see my review in Incognito I knew something was wrong. The best part of doing it this way is that all your reviews SHOULD be in the same order on both screens… If the review wasn’t there I would check the google search which would show it.You can determent which reviews are private from here and then you can remove or trying a new submission. Hope this helps.

I know you have a lot of reviews and this would be very time consuming.

Hello @MortenCopenhagen sir…its interesting post.

Following are the calculations from my profile

03.95 % hidden reviews (07 out of 177 reviews).

00.00 % hidden star-only-ratings (00 out of 21 ratings).

17.07 % hidden photos (63 out of 369 private photos/).

00.00 % hidden videos (00 out of 04 private photos/).

On average 1127 views per public photo/video. (3,44,822 / 306/ 04)

Thank you so much for enlightening us on this topic. :blush: :pray: