RealRating: Real Google Maps Reviews

Shows what a place on Google Maps is really rated, by adding back the reviews it had deleted for 'defamation'.

A Google Maps rating can be edited by lawyers. In Germany a business can have honest reviews deleted by claiming defamation, and plenty of them do. Roughly 1.6 million reviews disappeared this way in a single year. Every other EU country put together managed a few hundred. Google now prints the number of deleted reviews on the business profile. RealRating does the obvious thing with that number: it puts those reviews back in and works out what the score would have been. A 4.7 sitting on top of fifty deleted complaints often turns out to be closer to a 3.4. You do not have to do anything for this. Open a place on Google Maps and the adjusted rating appears next to the stars, with a sentence explaining where it came from. If you would rather check a place by hand, the toolbar button opens a small calculator. The number is an estimate, and the extension says so plainly. Google never reveals how the deleted reviews were rated, so RealRating gives you a likely range instead of pretending to a precision it does not have. Everything happens on your own machine. There is no account to create and nothing gets sent anywhere, because the extension only reads the rating that is already on the page in front of you. One caveat. Google currently shows the deleted-review count on German business profiles, so that is where the automatic badge turns up. The calculator works on any place where you can see such a count.