Is this 100% fair?

[RonanM]

HI all,

I have been google guiding now for some time but I have a small issue with the process. OK here we go; just say you go to a restaurant one time, and on that one time you have a bad experience,  you give it a bad review and a low star rating. That experience may have been a one off, and not reflective of the establishment as a whole. Shouldn't there be a method whereby the reviewer identifies themselves as a "One Timer". Now, if that "One Timer" goes back for a second time and gets the same experience well  by all means give an honest review and a accurate star rating.

I do feel that unless you have frequented the establishment more than three times well then you shouldn't be able to give it a star rating.

[HashimN]

@RonanM Good point. There is another related issue. Say a restaurant was doing really good for some years and now has now gone really bad. But the reviews are predominantly from old times. If I go there for the first time seeing the rating on google maps, I'd think the maps system isn't any good.

Maybe if the system can give a rating score based on a weighted system. For example latest reviews have more weightage than the older ones. I think that'll help. . . 

[pyerdna]

Hi @RonanM

we can always edit the comments that we made.

said we give 1 star last month due to the bad service,

and when we revisited we see that the service was improved ! (perhaps thanks to our comment and rating)

then we can edit our previous 

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@RonanM wrote:

HI all,

I have been google guiding now for some time but I have a small issue with the process. OK here we go; just say you go to a restaurant one time, and on that one time you have a bad experience,  you give it a bad review and a low star rating. That experience may have been a one off, and not reflective of the establishment as a whole. Shouldn't there be a method whereby the reviewer identifies themselves as a "One Timer". Now, if that "One Timer" goes back for a second time and gets the same experience well  by all means give an honest review and a accurate star rating.

I do feel that unless you have frequented the establishment more than three times well then you shouldn't be able to give it a star rating.

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comments,

give more star - perhaps 5 star ?

cheers,

Andrey

[iyudhi]

@RonanM I can agree with you to some extent. Basically I won't give a place a review until I'm sure that it will reflect the whole experience in general. So let's say I go to a place once, and I feel like the treatment I'm getting (either good or bad) won't be the general experience, I won't write a review. I will wait until I frequent the place a few times before doing so.

However, if I already get an idea of the general experience after just one visit, I will go ahead and write the review. There's no exact logic or science or doing so of course, since it's purely based on your judgment. Basically as long as you try to give review as fair as possible, you shouldn't worry too much about it. 

[Pea]

Nothing in life is 100% fair. 

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@RonanM wrote:

I do feel that unless you have frequented the establishment more than three times well then you shouldn't be able to give it a star rating. 

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Practically speaking how would that work, an honesty check box? "Have you been here more than 3 times? Tick. OK, now you can review" Or maybe geo tagging your movements? That wouldn't work if on your first three visits you didn't take your phone, or it was off.

When you think about the logistics it's not really possible, besides the theory of ratings is that it is an aggregate, so one 'incorrect' rating is only part of a wider picture from the wisdom of the crowd.

[Pea]

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@HashimN wrote:

Maybe if the system can give a rating score based on a weighted system.  

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How do you know it's not? One thing is for sure, the ratings total is not a simple average of the totals, as Google says: "We calculate an overall rating based on user ratings and a variety of other signals". What those 'other signals' are and how they are weighted against actual ratings we don't know.

[HashimN]

@Pea You're right. Its actually not just simple average.