Some business owners have moved on. They chase TikTok trends, pay for placements in curated directories, and ask customers to leave reviews on niche platforms most people have never heard of. Yelp gets love from restaurants. TripAdvisor still holds sway for travel. But somehow, Google gets treated like old news. It’s useful for maps, sure, but often overlooked when it comes to customer reviews.
That’s a mistake.
Google remains the first stop for almost everyone. If someone hears about your business and wants to know if it’s legit, they’re not opening Yelp. They’re typing your name into Google. Right there in the sidebar, your star rating is the first signal of trust or trouble. It shows up before your bio, before your website, before anything else. Those stars, pulled from real users with verified accounts, carry more weight than most people realize. [Read more…]
When someone searches for your business, Google shows them everything—your name, your hours, your map location, and, maybe most importantly, your reviews. Those little yellow stars carry real weight. One bad review can plant a seed of doubt. A string of five-star ratings can tip a visitor into becoming a customer. People trust what other people say. And Google, for better or worse, has become the place where those opinions live.
A startup called Farnsworth & Co. has found a niche in the dark overlap between surveillance, malware, and civil litigation. Their product? Personal data stolen from infected computers—now available for purchase by debt collectors, divorce lawyers, and anyone with a grudge and a budget.
If you use an Android phone, there’s a good chance Google’s Gemini AI is now interacting with your apps, even if you thought you had disabled it. The company recently rolled out changes that grant Gemini new levels of access to messages, phone calls, and third-party apps like WhatsApp, regardless of whether users had previously opted out. If that sounds invasive, it’s because it is.
You click a link. It takes you to a site that looks exactly right. The logo matches, the name checks out, and everything feels familiar. But something’s off. And before you realize what it is, you’ve handed over your login, your credit card, or worse, your network credentials. The trick wasn’t in the layout or the content. It was in the letters.