
Google gave our business listing to a competitor - benryon
https://www.parkcityluxuryrealestate.com/blog/google-gave-our-our-business-listing-to-a-competitor-and-our-fight-to-get-it-back.html
======
Arainach
This Reddit Comment describes what's happening here well:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/gtexcj/google_gave_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/gtexcj/google_gave_away_our_business_listing_to_a/fscjgyp/)

>The core reason it happened... this place doesn't qualify to be on the map in
the first place and it thus confuses the system.

>The secondary reason... the name of a feature is supposed to be the name and
nothing more.

>A real estate agency qualifies to be on the map. Google also lets certain
professionals to be on the map, with realtors being one such professional.

>This is neither of those, this is a "team". It's not allowed on the map
anymore than the team or shift I'm on at my job.

>Here's the exterior. As you can see the name of the agency is "Summit
Sotheby's International Realty", that's on the map at
[https://goo.gl/maps/cVEtvvRqCnJq5aEJ8](https://goo.gl/maps/cVEtvvRqCnJq5aEJ8).

>Other than the agency, all that then qualifies to be at this location are
listings for individual realtors. So a listing that says "Cindy Wallace" and
nothing more in the title is allowed. Instead we have her trying to keyword
stuff her listing with Park City Utah Real Estate - Cindy Wallace Team. She
also uses the category of Real Estate Agency when she isn't one, she needs to
use the Real Estate Agents category. Probably doesn't work the trend of trying
to represent your "team" as it's own agency.

>It's pretty common for people to not follow the rules and then complain that
the algorithms don't do what they want. Follow the rules and the algorithms
will then work.

~~~
pdonis
If what this reddit comment is saying is correct, it seems to me to mean that
Google's business reviews are unreliable information.

The complaint is not that "The Fisher Group" should be on the map instead of
"Summit Sotheby's". The complaint is that reviews which used to be attached to
one agent (Stan/Ben Fisher) are now attached to a different agent (Cindy
Wallace). Apparently this happened because two different Google Business
accounts (one that Stan/Ben Fisher had had for years, and one that Cindy
Wallace just created) got merged into one. That seems to me to be a problem
for two reasons:

(1) How can Google not comprehend the idea of multiple business accounts at
the same address?

(2) How can Google merge a newly created Google Business account with one that
has existed for years _without checking with the owner of the one that has
existed for years_? Saying "well, the person who set up the new account made a
mistake" is not a good answer.

Of course, AFAIK these people aren't paying Google, so to Google they're not
customers, they're just users whose data Google wants to sell. But maybe if
enough people get the idea that Google is simply incapable of providing
accurate data on businesses and reviews, and stop depending on Google for that
information, and word of that gets around, Google might start thinking that
maybe they need to do something. (Not that I'll be holding my breath.)

~~~
chrisseaton
> it seems to me to mean that Google's business reviews are unreliable
> information

Of course they are - any information at this scale is best-effort and should
be treated as just a general indication and possibly erroneous.

~~~
leereeves
Even the Yellow Pages were able to manage information at this scale more
accurately. Google's culture favors minimum effort, not best effort.

~~~
user5994461
The local yellow pages made the business pay about €1000 to be listed (could
be quite a bit more depending on the category). Google may have numerous
issues but it doesn't require you to pay one month of income.

~~~
leereeves
Is it even possible for a business to pay Google for better service? It seems
like they just can't be bothered to fix the info, not even for €1000.

~~~
monadic2
Yes, but it’s called getting a google employee drunk.

Not even joking, this is by far the fastest way to get a response.

~~~
catalogia
Plying people with alcohol seems very unethical.

------
labster
Once again, HN is the last-resort customer support line for Google. Oh well,
upvoted. Embarrassing the company is the only way to get any slightly complex
issue resolved.

~~~
jdm2212
I was (briefly) on a Maps-adjacent team at Google circa 2015.

From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are
responsible for how many products and data integrations.

One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every
single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. They
automate the crap out of it and the automation mostly works (scrape structured
data off websites, Google My Business, various aggregators, etc.) but it means
there's no conceivable way you could provide customer support that will keep
up with the volume of support requests because the support requests often
ultimately have to get routed to an engineer... and there are only a dozen
engineers on the team that owns stuffing all this data into Maps. And those
engineers are supposed to be doing mostly feature work. Over time accuracy got
better, but 95% accuracy, to say nothing of 99.9% accuracy, is unachievable to
the point of being a non-goal.

One of this team's bigger time sucks was just _other Google engineers_
complaining about inaccurate data. Someone would go to their favorite
restaurant, notice the hours were off, or the business category was wrong, and
file a ticket. Then the team would sometimes manually edit the listing to fix
it. Sometimes they'd say "no, you have to deal with the same shitty data as
all our customers". But that was just the requests coming in from a few
thousand users who had access to the internal ticket system and new which
component to file stuff under. (Incidentally: this is the origin of the Maps
feature where you can now just directly edit a listing and if other users,
agree, it gets published.)

So, yeah, there isn't really a scalable way to manage support requests. But HN
works for some subset of cases, and I too upvote the cases that get complained
about here.

EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it
was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking
at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right
even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings.

~~~
luckylion
If I may ask you, because that's something I've wondered many times with
Google: why are the docs and self-help support option so basic on most of
these things?

I understand the idea of "automate it, it must scale", but especially then I'd
expect the systems to add/correct/delete info to be super streamlined, the
documentation to be very thorough and covering all business cases etc. Yet it
feels like the opposite is true: the GUIs are generally sub-par and feel like
"okay, we have a great API. Can you throw some GUI on it?", the documentation
is short and often either outdated or did not cover certain cases in the first
place, and "what to do if this doesn't solve your problem" is rare.

Is that "we want to be a platform, not a service provider" and meant to
discourage end-users from using the system directly and pay a professional
agency instead that handles the support issues? Because that's really the only
explanation I've heard so far that makes some sense. It feels like Google is
putting more manpower in developer relations than in customer relations and
I've never understood why.

~~~
mjw1007
On documentation:

I've seen dozens of articles on this site about hiring practices from large
technical companies, and Google in particular.

I don't remember seeing anything suggesting they even verify that the people
they're hiring are capable of writing basic documentation, let alone that they
appreciate the importance of it being complete, correct, and up to date.

Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for
internal and external purposes.

~~~
MattGaiser
> Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for
> internal and external purposes.

This just seems to be companies as a whole. Documentation is a low-status
activity (no promotions or raises available for doing it) that still requires
decent cognitive function, so it is not something you want to do when you are
energized and ready to go nor something you can do when tired and not in the
mood to work.

There are no automated tests to tell you that the documentation no longer
works, so the engineers would need to periodically check. We have automated
tests in code because engineers won't comprehensively check everything.

In my org we frantically document when an engineer gives notice. Otherwise, we
can't even keep the URLs updated or maintain a running list of configuration
variables.

~~~
mjw1007
There's a virtuous circle with documentation: if you start with something
that's complete and correct, then when you make a change which is visible to
the code's clients you can go and change the documentation in the same patch
series, and check that this happens as part of the main code review.

Digging yourself out of the hole where your documentation is already wrong or
incomplete is much harder: when you go to describe a change you might find
that the thing you're changing isn't mentioned, or is described wrongly, or
there is no terminology for the thing you need to talk about.

So you need everyone to take care that standards don't slip, which is why it's
important to make the importance of documentation part of the company culture,
and make sure every programmer is capable of doing their bit.

------
krisgenre
"Google Offers No Help"

Even though I love Google, this is increasingly getting scary. More than
hackers getting into my account, I am actually more afraid of getting locked
out by Google one day.

An year or so back I created a Google account for my five year old daughter to
be used on a Nexus 7 2012 (yes, it still works). Recently, I reset the device
and tried logging in with my daughter's account but had forgotten the
password. In spite of giving the recovery address correctly and entering the
OTP that was sent, Google kept telling me it couldn't confirm if I was the
owner of the account.

Since this is a new account I don't have a problem but what if this happened
to my main account?

------
jakozaur
The current internet giants got huge monopolistic like power that many
dictators of many countries would envy. The set their rules, execute them, and
judge them.

Even having a decent map listing is sometimes make it or break it in
competitive industries such as hotels or restaurants.

I believe once you become a platform there should be an independent nano-
courthouse where you can appeal. Today being rejected or having listing
hijacked on Apple, Amazon, or Google platform is equivalent to the economical
death penalty for many individuals.

It should be possible to pay $100 by individuals and appeal to an independent
nano-courthouse if the original platform rejects or blocks you. If you win,
the appeal fee is refunded and the platform has to cover the cost. If you
lose, your $100 is gone.

~~~
BlueTemplar
I believe that article 17 introduced something like this in UE for YouTube?

------
cryptica
One of the main problems with these giant mega corporation is that they don't
have the bandwidth to interact with people and there is no recourse for people
when things to wrong. Corporations are negligent by design and the worst part
is that the government allows them to keep sweeping problems under the carpet
at no cost to them.

Because of their scale, corporations are harming millions of people in
thousands of different ways through their neglect but because the level of
neglect is subtle when mentioned in a court room setting, these corporations
are not being punished for the real damage that they cause.

~~~
diggan
This is not a "giant mega corporation" issue, it's a Google issue, because
they simply do not prioritize customer support at all.

Now I'm neither an Apple fan nor Microsoft fan (don't like their business
decisions at all), but I have been required to deal with their customer
support at times. It's actually possible to get your hands on a real human to
get support, so you can solve stuff.

The same cannot be said for Google.

~~~
izacus
> Now I'm neither an Apple fan nor Microsoft fan (don't like their business
> decisions at all), but I have been required to deal with their customer
> support at times. It's actually possible to get your hands on a real human
> to get support, so you can solve stuff.

Did you actually get customer support for Apple Maps? Because they've been
completely ignoring my updates to their mistakes in my area and have been
pretty much the same as Google in that respect. Except that at least Google
Maps are correct.

------
remote_phone
At this point Google has a monopoly on the search business.

When their algorithms hurt a business when you try to search for it, and they
are not willing to change it or help, why is this not libel?

They should be responsible for supporting this monopoly, and they should have
competent support people that can either explain what’s going on or can fix
it. They have neither and businesses really do suffer.

I think a class action lawsuit should be started against Google until they
start investing in support services and that can adequately fix mistakes. If
not a class action lawsuit, then I fully support legislation and regulation
that forces them to spend on support.

This has happened so many times across so many of their platforms, it’s
obvious what they are doing. They have created a monopoly and then their
entire ecosystem depends on them, but they spend almost nothing to support
their ecosystem. That’s how they remain so profitable.

~~~
Traster
>why is this not libel?

Is this not just a straight up section 230 instance? They're just displaying
user generated content.

------
croh
This is the reason I hate google. No customer support at all. They will just
provide link to forum. I will go with Microsoft anytime for business software
than Google. I feel like it is company built by nerds with zero business
sense. If your KPI depends on building new products, there ain't a reason to
improve existing ones. Classic case of Goodhart's law.

~~~
tech-historian
It's not like Microsoft is pure as the driven snow, either. It's a massive
corporation with all sorts of warts. Just to name a few from the past few
months:

WinGet fiasco: [https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-
winget...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget-
windows-package-manager-appget-copied)

O365 Installer forces Bing as search default:
[https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/22/21077280/microsoft-
chrome...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/22/21077280/microsoft-chrome-bing-
extension-office-365-proplus-installer-default-search-engine)

Azure jacks up prices in sneaky ways:
[https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/microsoft-screws-
customer...](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/microsoft-screws-customers-
and-its-own-advocates-alike/)

MS ends partner benefits:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/11/microsofts_reasons_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/11/microsofts_reasons_for_ending_free_licenses_for_partners/)

Closes eBooks store, customers lose all purchased books:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367)

Microsoft partners with ICE for facial recognition and other technology:
[https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-employees-up-in-arms-over-
clou...](https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-employees-up-in-arms-over-cloud-
contract-with-1826927803)

etc etc etc.

------
ianhorn
The discussion here is largely about how it's impossible to be really correct
at Google scale, and this is something that terrifies me about where the
industry is going. When there's a task that can be done by people, we can
always correct issues. Going down to 99% correct could also mean cutting costs
by like 90% through automation, so the business is going to be happy, except
that now there's no one for the consumer to turn to but the bots when things
go wrong.

In the future, if your name is Scunthorpe [0], you're out of luck, because
it's impossible to not have these issues at scale, and apparently scale is
inevitable.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

~~~
dkersten
The “x is impossible at google scale” (where x usually means customer support
but in this case information correctness) argument falls flat to me. If x is
impossible at their scale, then their scale needs to be cut back. Companies
shouldn’t be allowed to be so large and all-encompassing and monopolistic that
they negatively impact society because x is impossible at that scale.

~~~
acituan
You’re right. Yet currently there is one major normativity in action and that
is the normativity of the market. Market rewwards economies of scale and
monopolies more than anything else. Unfortunately there is no working
institution left to bring in the normativity of societal good for balance. One
might hope for state to make a move, but big tech pays _the_ most lobbying
money currently, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

~~~
dkersten
> so I wouldn’t hold my breath

Of course. I agree that market pressure is pushing companies that way and
there's little that can stop it now. But that still doesn't make the excuse a
good one, certainly not for us, the people.

------
legohead
Searched for lawyer both in the post and this comment section and got nothing.

You'd be surprised what a lawyer can accomplish, even with no real law backing
you up. You want an actual response from Google? Get a lawyer involved...

~~~
Glyptodon
That's actually another problem in itself. You shouldn't need a lawyer just to
be given the time of day when there's a problem.

------
jlokier
Some may be sympathetic to Google not providing enough customer support for
tricky issues.

But here's a much simpler problem I've had.

I have a Google My Business account which was long ago properly authorized and
verified for a business at a particular location. Verified by landline phone,
photos, etc.

One day some random member of the public put in some incorrect information.

I didn't notice the change for about 6 months.

Now, even though I created, control, have verified etc, the Google My Business
account for that data, and theoretically I'm the only person with that level
of control over the business listing... I'm "not authorised" to correct the
information via Google My Business itself.

Wtf?! Isn't that what it is _for_?

I can still login to Google My Business. I can edit some fields - I'm still
regarded as the authority for sensitive things like phone number. So they
haven't removed my special status (nobody else can edit the phone number).

Rather, some things in Google My Business which are editable fields and the UI
invites me to edit, give "not authorised" when I submit. That was surprising,
I thought I was the authority.

After trying every option, I tried Google's online support from Google My
Business. It said I'd get a response in a few days; in reality it took longer
than a month to get a terse and useless reply. I sent a few messages in that
time, basically asking "is there anyone there"?

Eventually I did speak with someone at Google about this. They told me that I
needed to go through the whole "prove your business is what you say it is and
not what a random member of the public said it is" verification rigmarole all
over again, with photos, etc. In the circumstances I was not able to do so (I
wasn't on site enough any more, and our office wasn't as visually distinctive
any more).

I'm asking myself, what is the point of a verified Google My Business account
if randoms can override the business owner and lock them out anyway??!

That was last time.

Before that, it took _2 years_ to remove an incorrect address and location for
the business.

I don't think that can be put down to "limited staff for customer support".

I put it down to poor & misleading system design. What is the point in telling
people to get, verify and maintain Google My Business account, only to _subtly
not mention_ that it still isn't authoritative data for your listing, and the
owner may get overridden by randoms. Probably without noticing for a long
time.

------
anthuswilliams
I know that this makes it to the front page because it is symptomatic of
frustrating and frightening things that affect society as a whole. I won't
comment on those things because I don't know the answers.

But insofar as you want to solve your particular problem, there is a simple
answer that seems not to have been suggested here. Get a lawyer and sue them!

------
jand
I do not know for sure if this is related, but it definitly tastes the same:

Back in 2010 [1] I logged into google using chrome on my mother's device.
Removed the account from the device afterwards. Today, many devices later, we
still were not able to stop my mother from receiving autofill entries,
contacts and such originating from my account.

Long story short: I am tried to vouch for the existance of non-layer-8 trouble
leading to "shared accounts". Neverending fun.

[1]: maybe 2012

------
pacifika
This matters because there’s a monopoly in the market.

------
AlleUndKalle
This is gross!

------
nitinreddy88
I think, We haven't seen single week in 2020, where Google didn't fail to make
it front page for worst customer support and for their evil practices.

~~~
jldugger
Except when the headline says 'competitor' the truth seems to be 'coworker'.

~~~
Can_Not
Except in their industry they are still competitors even if they've chosen to
be co-workers to save on costs like office space and marketing.

~~~
jldugger
In a sense, everyone is. Want that promotion? Better be going 'above and
beyond.' Even just choosing who to lay off is competitive.

------
habosa
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Maps and am speaking for myself, not
my employer.

I am normally very sympathetic to HN complaints about Google customer service.
They're normally about Cloud or GSuite, this one is a bit different.

Does anyone here think it would actually be possible to have a free (or even
cheap) comprehensive maps service that also has customer support? How many
dedicated support people would you need to make fair human decisions about
every place, road, and business in the entire world?

Maps are just really really hard, especially as we expect them to be so much
more than the simple maps they replaced. It's a database of everything there
is to do in the world. And we don't pay a dime.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
I hope it's not controversial to say that if your ambitions are to be the
whole world's middle man on something, you have some responsibilities
regarding how to do it.

Google doesn't have a "hey, these are scraped and only have like 80% accuracy"
disclaimer or anything like that when they direct customers to businesses. I
don't know where the line is but Google has some level of basic ethical
requirement to not try to be the middleman when their failures (or in google
terms >80% accuracy) cost others rather than themselves.

It's presented as correct, not as a best guess. I get that it's impossible to
be 100% correct at this scale, but then just don't present it as
authoritative. Or let people correct mistakes that are harming them. Or
_something_ besides just driving traffic to their own product and saying
there's nothing they could do.

~~~
izacus
Is there ANY company that will do that? Can you sue the yellow pages if
they're wrong? Or a wrong map?

Or even your own projects - are you willing to put your money and perhaps even
criminal record on the line if your company sells data that's not accurate for
a percentage of customers?

~~~
callmeal
>Can you sue the yellow pages if they're wrong? Or a wrong map?

Yup. You can also win.

[https://www.pmmag.com/articles/84301-oops-the-yellow-
pages-b...](https://www.pmmag.com/articles/84301-oops-the-yellow-pages-blew-
my-ad)

>>A Pennsylvania caterer had an outdated phone number placed in his ad. The
phone number, used briefly in the past, had been assigned to someone else. The
result: The caterer lost a ton of money and eventually filed for bankruptcy.
He sued the phone company for negligently listing the wrong number. The jury
awarded him $200,000.

