When you review a restaurant on Google Maps, do you tell everyone about its must-try dishes? Do you include helpful tips for visitors in your reviews of local landmarks? We have great news for Local Guides who share thoughtful, thorough, detailed reviews: Starting today, they’ll earn you bonus points.
Here’s how it works: Write 200 characters or more in any review, and you’ll get 5 bonus points. That’s in addition to the 5 points each review is worth on its own, plus 1 point for your rating.
We know that many of you have written lots of detailed reviews already, so you’ll get bonus points for past reviews, too. (If you don’t see those points right away, don’t worry. There may be a delay before they appear.)
We hope you’re excited about bonus points for detailed reviews! Let us know what you think.
Thanks @HelloJess will test it later. Anyway, I’ve already got 403 200+chars reviews as per my new badges! So I expect more than 2000 points only from this feature!
Yeach @HelloJess it’s awsome. i was try to write more 200 chr for review and the result get more point, it make more fast to get more lvl in LG contribution.
Hope can help other person to know about place and information.
Good news! Google Maps really lacks good and detailed reviews. All these “Nice place” and “Great food, reasonable prices” have no useful information. I have to admit that I wrote such kind of reviews too…
I’m glad this has been announced. Sometimes the community might pick up on a little few things as this and so people jump the gun.
However, I’m still questioning the points distribution. I don’t think an extra 5 points for having more than 200+ characters is meaningful or impactful as it may seem. Someone who just types “Good” with four characters in comparison to someone who just falls short of the 200 characters and writes 198 characters both get the 5 points. I think a spectrum of points needs to be considered.
Tapping a rating star only takes one second. Thus, one point. Typing a random short compliment such as “Great food” “Fantastic service” or something random gives you five points. Typing something more than 200 characters with a detailed experience gives an additional five points, for a total of ten. Thus I propose (as previously posted, but modified slightly):
Review under 40 characters: 1 point
Review between 40-79 characters: 2 points
Review between 80-119 characters: 3 (**+1)**points
Review between 120-159 characters: 4 (+2) points
Review between 160-199 characters: 5(+3) points
Review over 200 characters: 6 (+4) points
But what does the number in the brackets represent? Additional points rewarded for having your review marked as helpful. I believe that the feature is quite underutilised and therefore should probably be rewarded a little bit further. Therefore by introducing a hard cap (that is the maximum amount of additional points that will disallow unruly behaviour and inflation, it can help. Anywho, as always, my two cents worth.
Also it’s very easy to find out if someone’s copying and pasting the same 200+ character review all over and over again, let’s hope they will be more inclined for review and reporting. So let’s see how this will go.
Example of a random 200+ character review:
This review is about my experience at the restaurant. It is a good restaurant and there is nice decoration on the wall. I ate the food and the food was very good. The waiter was also good and the time to cook was good time.
@HelloJess thats a good news for those who are really interested and focus on their detailed review contribution. Bonus points hopefully will reduce the spamming too.
It’s better than nothing 
?
