
Google Maps is filled with false business addresses pretending to be nearby - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-maps-littered-with-fake-business-listings-harming-consumers-and-competitors-11561042283?mod=rsswn
======
CommieBobDole
Odd that this doesn't mention the long-running locksmith scam wherein a Google
search invariably indicates that there are dozens of locksmiths within a few
miles of the searcher's location, most or all of which go to call centers for
scammy locksmith services.

Honestly, the problem the article describes is the exact same scam, just
extended to other business types.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam)

~~~
president
I was burned by this before (in SF Bay area). The call center dispatched a guy
that took over an hour to finally arrive in his broken-down family van. He
came out of his car with a power drill in his hand and asked me where the lock
was. The entire time he was smoking. Apparently, he wanted to drill through
the lock and replace the whole thing instead of picking the lock like a true
locksmith. Luckily there were enough red flags in the whole process to where I
promptly told him to get off my property. They still charged me $20 and I
ended up paying because I didn't want them to come back and do something to my
house. The guy ended up sending my credit card details to "HQ" through a text
message.

~~~
zippergz
This is why that Reply All podcast about this topic (posted by someone else in
this thread) is titled "Very Quickly to the Drill."

------
jdm2212
Xoogler here... my favorite Maps spam story is how there was a cron job that
ran every (I think) 6 hours to analyze and clean up suspected scam listings
[1]. The scammers figured out when the cron job runs, and set up their own
cron job putting up their listings again in the minutes after Google's
finished.

It's a well-known problem on Maps and has been known for years. It boils down
to: scammers are smart and resourceful and very good at making their scam
listings look like real listings.

[1] if you're wondering why they didn't do the filtering at submission time,
there was a good technical reason for this at the time that I don't remember
anymore

~~~
sytelus
This is not a technology problem, its a process problem. Vast majority of
submitters could be cheaply verified and for small number of potential
spammers, there are several options:

1\. Require submitter to be legally traceable and identifiable. Establish
fines/fees for misuse of your property and charge their bank accounts for
cleaning fees. Blacklist them for life.

2\. Once a submitter is identifiable and legally traceable, charge
exponentially higher fees for number of submissions unless they want to show
up as chain business in which case charge reasonable fee for validation and
background checks.

3\. Detect and avoid autonomous mass submissions except for highly trusted
entities such as big chains.

~~~
jdm2212
Google Maps is not optimizing for "percent of listings that were completely
accurate at time of submission". That's how paper maps (and to a lesser
degree, the Yellow Pages) mostly worked. There's a reason we stopped using
them.

What Google's doing is harder and more nuanced -- they want to accurately
capture the world as it exists around you right now. That means understanding
what parts of the world around you you care about and understanding what level
of accuracy (as opposed to promptness of updates) they should optimize for.
Given Maps' extraordinary success as a product, they've done this quite well.
But, yes, it has failure modes that users should be aware of and that Google
tries to combat without compromising the main goal.

~~~
toast0
Google is trying to build maps without human verification, because humans are
expensive, and to some degree because humans can be tricked too.

Accepting content without verification certainly has a side effect of getting
businesses on board the instant they open, too, but that's just a happy
accident.

~~~
jdm2212
Google is fine with _expensive_ (they sunk many billions into Maps over 10+
years and only just started monetizing it). But humans don't scale. If you
want to have ten thousand data points about every business on Earth, you can't
get there by relying on humans. You need to automate everything from top ot
bottom.

~~~
toast0
Humans can scale, it's just that Google chooses not to use them. Anything that
requires a human in the loop is something they won't do.

Customer service, not going to happen. Having Youtube Kids actually have
appropriate content for kids, unlikely. Being a trustworthy source for
businesses on maps, no way.

~~~
dmitriid
Google products have up to 2 _billion_ users. It's nearly impossible to scale
any human support to this size.

Because it's actually billion _s_ of users. It's a billion of users for Google
Maps. It's two billion of users for Youtube. It's nearly a billion for GMail.
And the requests for those different products have to go to different support
personnel.

In areas where there's significantly less users they do provide human support,
for example in GCP.

~~~
toast0
I work for a product with big numbers too. We have humans reading the support
queue (with a _lot_ of engineering to prefilter and group for bulk replies and
what not). People may or may not like our support, or may complain it's not as
good as it used to be, but it's there.

Frankly, we couldn't have as many users as we do without a human connection in
support. Users tell us what we're doing wrong, and what we need to do that
we're not doing, and where we need to improve --- but only if you listen to
them.

~~~
dmitriid
> Frankly, we couldn't have as many users as we do without a human connection
> in support.

Different companies and different products are different. It looks like many
Google products are good enough to attract many users without support.

------
arbuge
> Mr. Abuhazim tried reaching Google to explain his dilemma, but he was
> repeatedly routed to an offshore call center. Operators, he said, “treated
> me like I’m stupid.” With his businesses pushed off the first page of Google
> Maps results, incoming calls halved. He said he was on the verge of closing.

Google Ads customer support has been like this for many people ever since it
was outsourced offshore. It is basically useless at this point.

On a different note, I do find it amazing that this business owner thought it
would be a good idea to do the following:

"Last year, he was approached by a marketing firm that offered to lift his
business listings on Google Maps for a fee in the tens of thousands of
dollars. Mr. Abuhazim agreed to the deal."

If you wonder where that money went, see the screenshot in the article where
he clearly shows an average CPC of almost $9.

~~~
Spooky23
Its easy to explain — actual business people don’t understand how to work the
inscrutable nature of Google. So they look for advice.

I think it’s bizarre that stuff like this is trivial for scammers but
impossible for legit businesses.

My son’s catholic school has been around since 1950. A few students goofing
off wrote some negative reviews, and somehow they are in a limbo where nobody
can post reviews or modify the listing. I’m on the board and help with
advertising... The funny thing is that it costs Google money — we can’t
associate AdWords with the Maps listing. Just a few thousand bucks a year, but
still money.

~~~
StudentStuff
Why should a Catholic School be advertising on Google?

~~~
briandear
So they can attract students whose parents are searching for a school.

~~~
StudentStuff
Seems like a crummy way to reach potential students, wouldn't you want to tap
the local church's congregations? That is how the Catholic schools run in
Seattle, though they don't have the same 20% non-Catholic full ride
scholarship that they do in Portland (which made for a much better educational
experience IMO).

The Summer Lunch Program (which has a much broader target audience/geographic
area) in Seattle has experimented with online advertising, but had poor
results. The keys to the kingdom really are reaching kids (and their parents)
where they are, in schools, after school programs, and perhaps some online
platforms (though the targeting is generally ineffective on Facebook/Google
for this type of advertising).

~~~
icebraining
> wouldn't you want to tap the local church's congregations?

I'm assuming they do both. I don't know about the US, but around here Catholic
schools accept non-Catholics as well, and those may not be connected to the
church.

~~~
failrate
Yes, Catholic schools in the US are frequently the only advanced educations
for grade schoolers in nonmetropolitan areas. My folks were Methodist, and I
attended a couple Catholic schools.

~~~
dfc
What is an "advanced education for grade schoolers"?

~~~
hedora
It is a less offensive way to say “alternative to systematically underfunded
and failing public schools”.

~~~
shaftway
Yup.

I went to a Catholic high school, despite my family being basically non-
practicing Presbyterians. And in an area with a ton of private schools.

At the time public schools were a road to nowhere, and private schools were
easily $20,000 in today's dollars, maybe $30,000 depending on the school.
Catholic high school cost $8000 in today's dollars, and the only "downside"
was a couple of mandatory masses.

------
atonse
User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have
been gamed.

I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back in favor of yellow pages
like curation. And higher paid listings.

I already don't trust sites like Yelp and Angie's List, and instead go to
places like Consumers' Checkbook to look for local vendors.

There's something to be said for the quality of data curation and not user-
generated data.

~~~
0815test
> User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have
> been gamed.

Is OSM equally bad? There's many ways to run a "user-fed" project.

~~~
girzel
OSM isn't, but I suspect it's mostly because it's not high profile enough (the
old "nobody bothers writing viruses for Linux" problem). If it were, I'm sure
we'd see junk data. OSM's data is version controlled in some way, so I'd
assume it could be rolled back, but that sounds labor-intensive.

I use OSMand instead of Google Maps, and love it, except for the absolutely
atrocious address parsing when searching. There's also a general lack of
street numbers in my area (Pacific NW USA), which can make things difficult.

Amusingly, it also suffers from the "won't show you street name labels"
problem that other posters are accusing Google Maps of.

~~~
Moru
Using the app Streetcomplete, it's really easy to correct OSM data like street
numbers and opening times around you as you walk.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
I have been working on adding all street numbers for a small town of 40,000
people. Two years into this project, I am still little more than halfway done.
Adding a handful of street numbers with StreetComplete might be "easy", but it
is incredibly labor-intensive to add street numbers in an amount that makes
OSM actually useful for navigation purposes. Google only managed to get their
house numbers by forcing the world to do the work through ReCAPTCHA or by
buying the rights to various preexisting databases.

~~~
girzel
I wonder if OSMand could take advantage of having a _few_ street numbers.
Right now, in the "address search" mode, if the number you're looking for
doesn't exist, you're out of luck. But theoretically it could accept any
street number, and if a street even has a few numbers in place (I often find
random street numbers probably entered by residents or shopowners) it could at
least tell you "it's somewhere between here and there". Even that would be
vastly more useful.

Then mapped crusaders like yourself could first focus on adding numbers in the
middle of streets, and then gradually, in binary search fashion, continuing to
halve unnumbered street sections.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
One of the biggest challenges with mapping house numbers is simply getting to
that street to begin with. It takes a volunteer making an effort to go to
various parts of town that he/she doedn't normally go to, since most
neighbourhoods don't have their own local mappers interested in adding house
numbers.

Once someone has made that effort, then it isn't too much extra effort to do
all the house numbers. So, no need to restrict oneself to the middle of the
range.

OSMAnd's address search feature already allows you to choose from among the
house numbers that do exist for a street, even if the whole street isn't
mapped, so it is often easy to navigate to the general ballpark of your
destination.

------
jfasi
Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over
the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints:

* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.

* Places I _know_ are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.

* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport.

* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for _months_ after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to.

* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.

* While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face.

If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the
unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not just you. Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being
almost, but not quite, good at being a map. Street names in particular seem
like a low-hanging fruit that would vastly improve the UX, but for some
reason, they don't do anything about it.

~~~
CommieBobDole
I don't know for sure, but I think that's a problem that they had previously
solved - I remember being impressed years ago by the fact that the street
names always moved on zoom or scroll so they were always in view.

It seems like they've regressed for some reason.

~~~
CommieBobDole
Update: I did some testing and this still works for me - every time I zoom or
scroll, the street labels move to remain in frame. Tried on Chrome desktop,
iOS native app, and iOS Safari, same behavior in all three.

~~~
Nition
I've never understood these street name complaints on Hacker News either. It's
always kept the street names in the frame for me. If I zoom in a lot, it even
starts repeating the street name over and over[1], getting denser and denser
as I zoom in more.

[1] Example screenshot in Firefox today:
[https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png](https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png)

~~~
gattilorenz
Same area, Google Maps on modern Android:
[https://ibb.co/18wVw9k](https://ibb.co/18wVw9k)
[https://ibb.co/84tsSYS](https://ibb.co/84tsSYS)

It kinda works, but it's not that hard or uncommon to get to a zoom/pan level
where it breaks.

~~~
Nition
OK, so it's probably a browser vs. phone difference. Thanks for the
comparison.

------
nvahalik
I'll use Yelp/Apple Maps/Google for places to eat. That's about it. For
everything else, I will drive around town and look for a van or a truck with a
business/service that I need. Billboards. Even local newspapers. Word of
mouth, too.

The last A/C, plumbing, and appliance repair folks I've used have all been
people who drove by or were recommended to me by a neighbor. They'll also be
the people I end up recommending, too.

This is part of the reason I like Nextdoor so much. Since these are people who
(at least, ostensibly) are within my community, I know that they are at least
somewhat honest in their recommendations. They have nothing to gain but also
nothing to lose. But those companies that people do talk about are ones that
give great service or are a pleasure to work with.

Let's face it: we're seeing the pendulum swing back the other direction: it
used to be nobody would find you unless you are online, but now it seems that
physical advertising seems to be the litmus test of "are you real?"

------
hirundo
Pornhub told me that there was a mature divorced woman waiting to have sex
with me, just three miles away. Which puts her in undeveloped forest
wilderness in any direction. I'm a little worried about her out there but
don't want to get involved. Should I call search and rescue?

------
mholt
My neighbors (college students) advertise their home as a comedy club on
Google Maps with shows on Saturday nights. It has a lot of good reviews from
all their friends (5 stars). Once in a while they get a call from people
visiting town asking for tickets. And if anyone shows up, they'll put on a
show. But mostly it's a huge gag and... it's actually kind of funny.

~~~
theandrewbailey
So they essentially pulled what that shed did:
[https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-
the...](https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-
rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor)

------
danShumway
Back when growing up, my schoolteachers pushed like crazy the idea that
Wikipedia was inherently untrustworthy because anyone could edit it. At the
same time, we were all going crazy over Google Earth, which was the exact same
system, except a for-profit company owned it.

Having corrected mistakes before on Google Maps, it seems like there's
essentially no moderation at all for most listings. At least with sites like
Wikipedia, people will occasionally look at the edits I make.

It's strange to me to see community run projects get laughed at sometimes in
the mainstream, given that a nontrivial portion of the most successful
commercial products out there are essentially crowdsourced community efforts
except with worse moderation and higher stake by advertisers.

It feels sometimes like the standard is, "trusting random people to contribute
data is naive... unless a company then gets to own all of the data. Then it's
innovative."

------
ocdtrekkie
I've definitely seen the phone number on my dad's business listing get changed
before. I'm not even sure how they did it, because we had control of the
business listing, but I am not sure if Google still lets ordinary users
suggest changes.

~~~
mbf1
Ordinary users can suggest changes, but I believe that if you have a Google My
Business account that's active in the last 6 months, you get notified and can
approve / reject changes.

------
mc32
Whelp, that’s what you get when anyone can claim a business and or edit maps
without verification.

Since it’s a conflict of interest, likely Google will do little about it.

~~~
mbf1
Google has a large organization dedicated to map data quality. It's a hard
problem to solve - there's money from 3rd parties to be made from spamming the
maps. It's in Google's best interest to try and protect the end user from
fakes.

Local Guides is one of the many ways you can help police this in your area.
Verification is hard. To verify you need evidence and a way to prove it is
correct. Proof is hard.

Street View is one of the best evidence sources, but it's not allowed in all
countries, expensive, and not updated as frequently as the world changes, and
even user-provided street view images can be subject to forgery.

Unfortunately, the best course of action is vigilance. Report errors when you
see them.

~~~
UweSchmidt
I tried to report things a few times but was stuck at some kind of UI so I
gave up.

As for evidence, if someone (or several people) uses the maps app to travel to
a location, reports that it is closed for good, and travels to a competitor,
also using the maps app, that could indicate the report is valid. If other
people however navigate to this place and _stay_ before they head back home,
that could mean the place is actually not out of business.

Google is also good at spam detection, they know everyone who does anything
and could flag other actions by a fraudulent user etc.

We know that if Google wants to, they _can_ be this smart. But often aren't
these days. I think they just don't have both super capable people AND a
functional management in ALL of the many fields that they are in. That would
probably be impossible.

~~~
ballenf
Most of the spam discussed are specifically for businesses that come to you.
Repair services, locksmiths, etc. Or do delivery (florists, e.g.).

I think you're underestimating how hard this is and/or how motivated and smart
the scammers are.

------
leroy_masochist
I'm looking for a dog and I find this to be a big problem with Petfinder as
well. One in every three dogs, roughly, is listed as near me but the fine
print says it's currently being fostered hundreds of miles away (often in
Arkansas for some reason).

------
netwanderer3
Wouldn't they be able to solve this by requiring each registered business to
install a beacon at their store? Each beacon has a unique ID that is tied to
the business and the only data it sends back to the server are the ID and the
coordinates. It's 2019, why do we have to send people down to manually watch
or surveillance a business? That sounds more like a murder case investigation
and a bit excessive.

------
cwkoss
I have an (odd) simple solution: If google offered to pay $X for each good bit
of business address data, anyone submitting bad data would be committing
fraud. Google could send their whole profile to law enforcement. Would
probably get much higher quality data as well.

~~~
0xffff2
And "law enforcement" would be deluged with so many reports, with so little
actionable data, that they would simply ignore all of it. It's not even clear
to me exactly who Google would report this to. Is it the jurisdiction of
Google's headquarters? The jurisdiction of the fake business address? The
(possibly unknown) jurisdiction of the perpetrator?

------
blub
Read an article recently about someone in Europe who successfully sued
Facebook to have their business removed from the social network. Apparently
Facebook were adding pages for businesses by themselves, including pictures
and everything and were even showing ads for them.

Said person was upset that they did this behind their back and asked them to
take it offline, whereas FB suggested instead that he creates an account and
takes over the page. He sued and won, then Facebook of course appealed and
lost several times, needing to pay in the end 70.000 EUR as punishment. Now
anyone (in the EU probably) can refer to this case and ask their business to
be removed without having to create accounts.

Maybe someone should sue Google and create a precedent.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The problem is that Google is so universally relied upon by consumers to find
businesses, that delisting yourself from Google is shooting yourself in the
foot.

~~~
amelius
Shouldn't this fact ring all kinds of alarm bells at appropriate agencies,
e.g. FTC?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Apparently the DOJ is taking the reigns, actually, and is letting the FTC
other tech companies in exchange:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-01/google-
an...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-01/google-antitrust-
scrutiny-to-fall-to-doj-under-deal-with-ftc)

------
jimmaswell
There's a phantom Burger King on an on-ramp here, which doordash sends people
to. I've also ended up trying to go to a fake Wendy's. Lots of other weird
things if you look. Still though, Google Maps is great and gets the job done
well in 99% of cases.

------
lifeisstillgood
This seems like one of those problems that can be solved realtively easily
with crowd-sourcing. A kind of "verified purchase' but in real life. Open your
Google Maps app while standing in the law firm's offices - and click 'yes I
can see them' Maybe a photo.

Tie it perhaps to a UUID sent to the business owner (similar to adding a UUID
to your DNS TXT record)

And even the reverse is possible, I could vouch that there is no law firm at
this location - if I owned the building I probably would want to ensure that
it only had registered businesses there.

~~~
jdm2212
The Maps mobile app has had this for at least 3 years -- they ask you
questions about places you know. You can also suggest edits on Google Maps
which are sent to others for review But not _that_ many people use either
feature.

~~~
zo1
Even further back than 3 years. They previously used to even allow you to edit
the underlying map, business and _road data_ in a nifty UI kind of what OSM
does now. That was a good 5 years ago I think. But they deprecated it and I
guess replaced it with local-guides which is much more restricted and
"gamified".

------
hello_newman
Google maps is definitely filled with spam businesses. I am in digital
marketing for side projects, and there is a whole underground industry right
now that is teaching people how to game Google Maps to appear as real
businesses. It's stupid easy to get "verified" on google maps as a real local
business, even though you could be several state or continents away. I've
often wondered when google is going to crack down on this kind of thing, but
for now, it's still wide open.

------
alopecoid
Nothing about this problem is new or unique to Google Maps. This was a problem
in old phone books too (literally thousands of fake locksmiths, etc). And the
yellow pages profited there too. Just because it's fashionable to hate on "big
tech" these days, it doesn't mean that they've created problems like this.
These are the same old problems, evolved to modern medium. What's the
alternative? That we don't have services like this?

------
falsedan
I think Yelp do a pretty good job of avoiding this, simply for the fact that
they don’t have a cushion of associated traffic: people use Gmaps for this
because they use Gsearch or navigation, and if Gmaps isn’t great at filtering
out spammy listings, well it’s plenty good at other things. But if Yelp get a
reputation for poor business data quality, users wont want to use it for that
and there’s not a lot else to get them to visit & keep monthly active user
counts up & give sales impressive stats to quote to businesses when they call.

Also without quality business listings how would sales know the number to call
to pitch ad campaigns??

It’s a pity this approach doesn’t scale as wildly as search, Yelp shut down
all the non-North American sales stuff in 2016 presumably because it wasn’t
profitable.

------
reaperducer
I see this very occasionally on Apple Maps, too. I use the automated reporting
feature and in a day or two I get a notice that the problem has been fixed.

I'm not sure what the solution is, though. As soon as you ge the general
public involved, data becomes messy and unreliable.

~~~
jrnichols
I think Apple has some sort of trust system for user submitted corrections,
don't they? It seems reasonable to assume that they do. if someone is
submitting bogus corrections, they're less likely to have them published. I
use the "report an issue" feature sometimes and like you, i get a message a
couple days later. I've even gotten an email asking for some other details.

the "add a photo" option they have is quite handy too.

------
jillesvangurp
Back in the day when I was working in the places team in Nokia Maps, now Here,
we had some funny issues with data suppliers for things like hotels. The hotel
coordinates would invariably be in some favorable location (e.g. near the
beach) when in reality the location could be kilometers away from that. We
also had tens of thousands of user generated places named "My Home" or
variations of that in different languages. User provided content is not
necessarily very good. I always liked the Foursquare approach of asking their
users. They seem to be good at keeping their data up to date though their
coverage outside the hipster areas tends to be not great.

~~~
ssvss
>I always liked the Foursquare approach of asking their users.

I have never used Foursquare, can you say a bit more on how they do it.

~~~
jillesvangurp
They basically ask users to verify information about the places they are
checking into. This is how they learn about new places and meta data such as
categories, price ranges, etc. Google does a similar thing where they ask
their users to confirm information about places they've been to.

------
m463
It's really hard to get towing outside of town with this kind of stuff going
on with all searches (not just google).

I finally solved it because I realized I have roadside assistance with my car
insurance, and I just call my car insurance company.

------
devteambravo
My friend is trying to remove 3 fake Google My Business ads that are not
controlled by himself. He has no way or recourse to do so. Google does not
care. He spends $1500/mo on AdWords. For shame.

------
relic
I happened on a YouTube video of a TedX talk where a guy is really into this
Google Maps scam. He got to the point where he was able to impersonate the US
Secret Service and recorded a bunch of phone calls. The Secret Service told
google to fix their maps issue, but he said they just disabled some features
and reactived them without change a few weeks later.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c6AADI7Pb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c6AADI7Pb4)

------
el_benhameen
Not quite the same, but I lived in a house whose previous resident had run a
photography business out of it. It was still listed as the business address on
Google Maps, so I got a ton of junk mail (and some real mail, like bills!) for
the business. I reported the business as closed or moved a bunch of times, but
I never heard anything from Google and nothing ever changed. I just checked,
and it's still listed at the same address.

~~~
beauzero
This happens for LLCs that have never been properly closed (its a pain to
actually close an LLC in Georgia). So when they initially seeded maps, that
LLC data would pull up all around you or in your house even though the owner
of the LLC had moved when you bought the house. :) yeah it happened to us. My
only way to get rid of it was to get my "Local Guide" points high enough so
that I could say that the business was closed...don't ask me what the
threshold was...I just kept increasing my points until it finally removed it.
On another note, apparently if you get enough Google Local Guide points
eventually they send you some free socks. Seriously...not kidding.

~~~
el_benhameen
Interesting! I don't live in the house anymore and I just bought some socks.
Otherwise, I'd have to give that a try.

------
wiradikusuma
Tangentially related: I'm currently staying in a cheap hotel that's literally
called "<ChainName> Near <SomeHospital>".

The funny thing is that the hotel is more than 2km away from the hospital. YET
there's _another_ hotel from the _same_ chain that's literally next to the
hospital and it's called "<ChainName> @ <StreetName>".

Imagine calling Uber to pick you up from the 1st hotel.

------
EGreg
This is related to combating fake news.

What systems are the best for ensuring that it’s very costly to submit false
information? How can we improve on top-down corporations? Wikipedia seems to
do a good job being a honeypot for hacking the source of truth.

How does BGP do it? Does OpenStreetMap vet its info somehow? Does SETI@home or
Protein Folding@home check the results? Or is it just trusting everyone to not
mess with it?

~~~
rathel
> Does OpenStreetMap vet its info somehow?

Not in a strict sense of approving before it goes into the DB. But on the
other hand it's easier to monitor what's going on if you have access to data
and can monitor edits (e.g. with whodidit, achavi, overpass etc.)

------
simonsarris
My favorite Maps BS spam is when you look at the Q&A section for any famous
monuments, like the Tower of Pisa: It's non-stop children(?) asking the most
banal questions ("When was the tower built?"), and other questions that sound
suspiciously like homework that could be found in 5 seconds using a Different
Google Product.

------
acollins1331
And apple maps is full of not having the addresses or even knowing many places
exist. Iphone user that has attempted to use maps many times, especially for
privacy concerns but I'm tired of typing places into maps that I know exist
and it has no clue.

~~~
ballenf
I've submitted a few of those to apple (from within the maps app) and they've
been added within 24 hours. That may vary depending on the geographical
region.

But, yes, it's frustrating. I use Apple maps for the clean interface and
option to get a sane and pleasant route overview. ("Hey Siri show overview"
also works.)

------
koboll
It's amazing how many multibillion dollar companies have arisen by,
fundamentally, creating a worse version of the phone book that's nonetheless
more popular because it's on the web

------
throw7
The Google Maps team is losing core focus. Google Trips was recently killed
and they are trying to "integrate" pieces of it into maps. Not impressed by
this downward trend.

------
winrid
Ran into this when I had a car towed somewhere for repairs and the shop didn't
exist anymore.

Instead it was a guy using the name and working out of a van.

------
failrate
I'm misremembering the details, but I believe there's a laundry service in Abu
Dhabi named "Laundry Near Me".

------
kachurovskiy
I'm using Maps pretty intensely and haven't seen a single fake business yet.
Worst I've seen is single-person shops marking their home address as business
location, I just report those as "private" through the Android app and move
on. I'm sure the problem is there but it seem to only affect niche businesses
and use cases.

For locks in particular, just leave a backup key with your neighbor. It saved
us multiple times over the years.

------
quickthrower2
This isn’t news to anyone who has used Google maps. Sure this was happening a
decade ago.

------
fnord77
amazes me the myriad ways google is gamed (and how long it takes google to do
something about it)

------
anigbrowl
Don't be evil, just rent to it.

------
OrgNet
Google Maps, aka Wiki Maps... you can add whatever you want on there.

------
gman83
While the WSJ does mostly excellent reporting on Google, I can't help but feel
that their seemingly obsessive focus on Google over other stories is part of
Rupert Murdoch's years-long vendetta against Google.

~~~
dredmorbius
NYTimes have been on a similar kick, and you can find a general techlash
across most media these days.

~~~
reaperducer
Techlash isn't something invented by the media. The media merely reflects the
change in public opinion.

In the SV bubble, people still think the world loves, envies, and adores them.
For the most part, it does not. That tide turned long ago.

~~~
beauzero
Some would say that outside SV it really never came back after 2000.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'd argue otherwise.

Tech was derided largely as a scam following the dot-com bust. But then it
seemed to be a general positive at least through about 2013.

I'd pin the public shift to Snowden, 2013.

This is all very subjective and squishy, of course.

