New Delhi, Feb 19 (IANS): Google Maps has blocked or removed 55 million policy-violating reviews and nearly three million fake Business Profiles in 2020.

This is 20 million fewer reviews than it removed in 2019 as it saw a drop in the overall number of reviews due to fewer people being out and about during Covid-19.

"We took down more than 960,000 reviews and more than 300,000 Business Profiles that were reported to us by Google Maps users," Google said in a statement on Thursday.

The company said that it reviewed and removed more than 160 million photos and 3.5 million videos from Maps that either violated its policies or were of low quality.

"Our technologies and teams disabled more than 610,000 user accounts after detecting and investigating suspicious or policy-violating behaviour. We stopped more than 3 million attempts by bad actors to verify Business Profiles on Google that didn't belong to them," the tech giant informed.

Since Google started accepting contributed content in 2010, more than 970 million people have updated Maps in the form of reviews, photos, ratings and factual information like addresses and business hours.

"We also deploy thousands of trained operators and analysts who help with content evaluations that might be difficult for algorithms, such as understanding reviews with local slang," said Dan Pritchett, Principal Software Engineer, Google Maps.

Google said that as more people share their local knowledge on Maps, it will continue to invest in the policies, technologies and resources needed to make sure information is reliable.