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Yeah I just don't see this being a thing either. If Google allowed businesses to pay to moderate (i.e. censor) their own reviews at their own will then that destroys any legitimacy in the reviews of a business, eliminating any value of Google Maps reviews to the end-customer and killing the product.

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I understand this works in theory, but people still use Yelp, right?

Do they? I've never even heard it mentioned before other than in reference to controversies around them being dodgy. Maybe it's just not popular in my locale, but I've never heard of anyone using it or recommending it. By contrast I've used Google Maps reviews, and know of other people using it a lot

Yelp gave up on international reviews to focus on the US explicitly because they couldn't do internationalization. Google maps works quite well internationally except in Korea and China.

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