The Hidden and Deeply Buried Humanity of Google Reviews

Online reviews have a bad reputation. Mostly, they deserve it. People post stupid comments, in between posts that seem to probably be written by some sort of bot or commenting farm. While most of us use comments, it often feels like a necessary evil. After reading this article from reporter Will McCarthy, I realize that maybe I’ve been missing something: the beautiful humanity buried in Google Reviews. As McCarthy writes:

“Even if it’s wishful thinking, I really want to believe that buried beneath the mundanity, the weirdness, and the loneliness, there’s something powerful and ineffable about this record of shared experiences. Even after all this time mining through the reviews, I still don’t know exactly what it is. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll find gold.”

The gold he does uncover is people trying to leave a trace of the life they are living and the places they go. It’s more than banal takedowns of restaurants for taking too long to deliver food. There are reviews that are powerfully human in profound ways. Clearly they are well buried. I suspect most of us rarely encounter them. But finding them does seem like a task that could restore just a little more faith in the value of online opinions. Perhaps they aren’t as useless as they sometimes seem to be.