C.E.R.T.O. / Modules / Web pages / Google Maps reviews

PLATFORM · GOOGLE MAPS

Google Maps reviews

Every review left by a user, the photographs already grouped by place and the map of those places. With a comparison between what Google declares and what it actually shows.

It switches itself on

You paste the address into the forensic browser.
You start a web page acquisition, as always.
C.E.R.T.O. recognises the platform and does the rest.

No option to tick, no separate module to buy, no extra cost: it is the Web pages module, at its own rate.

A review is a public statement that affects a business's reputation, and in court it carries the weight of any other written text. When one author's reviews become a series — same wording, same date, different competitors — the single text matters less than the overall picture, and the overall picture lives in the profile of whoever wrote them.

Google Maps is not a site: it is an application that redraws the page as you scroll and fills the map little by little. C.E.R.T.O. scrolls both tabs to the end, photographs the steps, collects reviews and photographs, and rebuilds the map inside the bundle from the tiles it actually downloaded — not an image taken from somewhere else.

What goes into the bundle

What gets acquired

Only what the program actually does: every item matches a collection that exists in the code and has been tested on real acquisitions.

Reviews

Text, star rating, date, name and address of the place, the owner's reply and attached thumbnails. Sortable by date and by place in the bundle's dashboard.

Photographs by place

Every photograph in the “Photos” tab, already grouped by place by the site itself: the grouping is not reconstructed by us. For each one the bundle keeps hashes, dimensions and EXIF metadata where present.

The map

The place markers and the map as Google drew it during the acquisition, reassembled in the archive from the tiles actually downloaded and centred on the acquired view.

The reconciliation

How many contributions Google declares in the header and how many it actually shows once scrolling is exhausted. If the two numbers differ, the bundle reports both and the gap.

Recognised addresses

What you can paste

Recognition looks at the domain and the shape of the address. If it recognises nothing, it stays an ordinary web page acquisition: nothing is lost.

google.com/maps/contrib/<id>/reviewsthe contributor's reviews
google.com/maps/contrib/<id>/photosphotographs, grouped by place
google.com/maps/contrib/<id>the contributor profile

In the bundle

Where what it collects ends up

Folders inside the BagIt bundle, alongside everything else from the web acquisition: WACZ archive, screenshots, network traffic, certificates, report.

google-maps-contributor/
google-maps-contributor/localita/

The bundle's interactive.html dashboard presents them in tables with search and sorting, and works offline, on a double click, even on a computer without C.E.R.T.O. installed.

The raw response stays in the bundle

Where collection goes through a service, every response is preserved verbatim with its provenance envelope: queried address, method, status, moment of receipt. Anyone contesting the data can go back to the source rather than trusting our table.

Sealed like every acquisition

A BagIt 1.0 bundle with an Ed25519 signature, a double RFC 3161 timestamp and a CASE/UCO description, verifiable by anyone, offline, with the included verifiers.

It says when it stops

The document reports how many items the platform announces, how many were collected and why collection stopped. A stated limit is worth more than an asserted completeness.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

The questions we are asked most often about this platform.

Can all the reviews left by one person be acquired?

Yes. You paste the contributor profile address and C.E.R.T.O. scrolls the list to the end, collecting every review with its text, stars, date, place, address and the owner's reply where present, together with the photographs grouped by place and the map. This is the typical case of serial reviews aimed at a competitor.

What if Google declares more contributions than it shows?

The bundle reports both numbers and the gap, instead of picking the more convenient one. It really happens: in one test the header declared 307 contributions while the page, once scrolling was exhausted, showed 292 — fifteen fewer, with no explanation from Google (places removed, contributions withdrawn, content no longer public). A report saying only “292 reviews acquired” would assert a completeness never verified.

Does the map end up in the bundle?

Yes, and it is rebuilt from the tiles actually downloaded during the acquisition, centred on the acquired view: it is neither an image taken from another source nor a map generated after the fact. There are also photographs of the window with the list loaded, that is, the map as the operator saw it.

Does the acquisition leave traces on the profile or the reviews?

No. The collection reads the page and scrolls it, exactly as a visitor would: no buttons that change anything are pressed, nothing is liked, nothing is reported and nothing is written to the platform.