Google is obvioulsy irked by the increasing number of fake app reviews and ratings on the Play Store. However, it appears the company has finally taken stringent measures to combat fake reviews and improve authenticity on Google Play. The search engine giant has introduced a system that uses both AI and human insights to combat fake reviews and ratings on the Play Store.
“In 2018, the Google Play Trust & Safety teams deployed a system that combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews. A team of engineers and analysts closely monitor and study suspicious activities in Play’s ratings and reviews, and improve the model’s precision and recall on a regular basis. We also regularly ask skilled reviewers to check the decisions made by our models for quality assurance,” explained Fei Ye, software engineer at Google.
Google further adds that it has removed millions of fake ratings and reviews, along with thousands of apps that exhbhit such shady behavior. The search engine giant is essentially targeting a sudden surge in ratings, along with reviews that are hateful, vulgar, profane, or off-topic.
An example of incentivized ratings on the Play Store
Besides, Google urges developers to not run incentivized campaigns in order to improve Play Store ratings. “Don’t run campaigns, in-app or otherwise, like “Give us 5 stars and we’ll give you this in-app item!” That counts as incentivized ratings, and it’s prohibited by policy,” Google further adds in the blog post.
Finally, Google advises users to send feedback if they come across bad ratings and reviews on Google Play.Users can mark reviews as Spam if they sound hateful, gibberish, sexual, or profane.
