New Delhi, Feb 14 (IANS) Google has said it blocked or removed more than 170 million policy-violating reviews from last year on Maps and Search -- by using its new machine learning (ML) algorithm.

Last year, this new algorithm helped the tech giant take down 45 per cent more fake reviews than the year before.

More than 12 million fake business profiles were also blocked, the company said.

"Last year, we launched a new machine learning algorithm that detects questionable review patterns even faster. It does so by examining longer-term signals on a daily basis -- like if a reviewer leaves the same review on multiple businesses or if a business receives a sudden spike in 1 or 5-star reviews," Google said in a blogpost.

Moreover, the company said that improvements to video moderation algorithms -- like detecting fake overlaid phone numbers, helped them catch 14 million policy-violating videos in 2023 -- 7 million more than the previous year.

Business owners were protected from over 2 million attempts by hackers trying to claim Business Profiles that did not belong to them -- over 1 million more than in 2022.

Temporary protections were placed on more than 123,000 businesses after the company's systems detected suspicious activity and abuse attempts, Google noted.

Last year, Google filed a lawsuit against a malicious actor who had been posting fake reviews on Maps and fraudulently attempting to manipulate services for small businesses.