Google Changes the Way Product Reviews Come Up in the Search Results So Only High Quality Ones Are Seen

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 24 March 2022, 06:03 pm

Google is reportedly working on separating good product reviews from the bad ones before showing them in the search results.

The search giant's new update will affect how it ranks product reviews so that users can see expert reviews first and not the fewer information ones.

Google to Update Search Results for Products

According to GSMArena, the new update will require products to have reviews that do not just recite information from the manufacturer. The reviews need to tell first-hand experience from customers of what the product is like.

A good review does not only look at the bright side and does not only look at the product in isolation either. The review needs to contain both pros and cons and should compare the current product to previous versions and against other products considered as competition.

Also Read: Soon You Might See 'Buy Button' On Google Search Results: Should Amazon And eBay Worry?

Google released the four key items that the update will focus on. First, the product review needs to include helpful in-depth details, such as benefits, drawbacks, specifics on how a product performs, and how the product differs from its previous versions, if it has any.

Next, the product review needs to come from people who have used the products, and they must be able to show what the product is like or how it is used.

Third, the product review needs to include unique information beyond what the manufacturer provides, like audio, visuals, or links to other content that can detail the customer's experience.

Lastly, the product review needs to cover comparable products, or it must explain what sets the product apart from its competitors.

The search result update only covers English-language product reviews and will be rolled out in the next couple of months, so users should start seeing the effects soon.

Decreasing Irrelevant Search Results

According to 9to5Google, the search giant has reported that the search decreased the number of irrelevant results by 50% in the last seven years after a critique blamed targeted search engine optimization or SEO content for the declining quality of results.

Google cites internal metrics based on quality rater data in a Q&A with Danny Sullivan. The quality raters are located worldwide, but they do use Google's guidelines, according to XDA Developers.

Some people complained that SEO is responsible for deciding what appears first in the search results. Those posts are often of questionable quality and pages that are clearly designed to get page and ad views instead of providing the best answer to a user's question.

In response to this, people have appended Reddit to their search query so they can get results written by actual humans with knowledge of the topic.

Meanwhile, the number of ads that appear before the non-sponsored posts is the other ongoing complaint.

Google reiterated that it makes a lot of improvements to Google Search every year, including over 5,000 in 2021, while it runs more than 800,000 experiments and ongoing quality tests.

Also, there has been a 60% increase in natural language queries to Google Search since 2015. This corresponds to Google's improving the NLP so that people can use language closer to the way they normally write and speak.

In February, Google added a hotline for domestic violence cases in the search results.