Google Maps is filled with false business addresses pretending to be nearby | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps is filled with false business addresses pretending to be nearby

wsj.com

358 pointsJumpCrisscross246 comments

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

And has been happening since at least 2014, with articles in the NYTimes as well as other sources.

Nice Reply All podcast about the locksmith scam: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho87

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locks...

> Nearly all of those ads promise “$19 service,” or thereabouts, a suspiciously low sum, given that “locksmith”-related ads cost about $30 or so per click, depending on the area.

There's the weapon against them right there. If you're a crusader, don't be a volunteer mapper for Google. Find the fake listings (drive there and look, or street view?) and then click on them, costing the scammers every time. I imagine clicks could be automated once discovered? Or at least shared with other volunteers who can click.

> ...a locksmith in Phoenix, [...] wanted to know how many locksmiths were listed in Arizona. “There were 9,600 of them in the list I got from Acxiom,” he said. “That’s about 9,000 more than anyone believes actually work in the state.”

This is terrible. The honest neighborhood guy is also a victim along with the customers.

Florists do something like this too.

This isn't really that industry specific, the rehab scams were the same way: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go...

You look for a local addiction rehab, but get a call center for a company which pimps out rehab centers in Florida.

Locksmith use to do the same kinds of scam on 411 services and yellow pages listings. The fees to have multiple business phone lines with the phone company was the real curation.

My uncle was a locksmith. His listing was "AAA Locksmith". He was pretty proud about gaming the indexing system that way.

I can always tell when I call one of these businesses because they answer the phone with a generic "Locksmith" or "Florist" or whatever instead of "Bob's Locks," or "Farrah's Flowers". It just sounds so weird.

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.

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

This is absolutely a case where it's best to forget about high-tech and pick up your Yellow Pages. Any legitimate locksmiths will have their state license number displayed in their ads.

What about yelp?

Last time I needed a locksmith I was very careful to check if they were on Google Street View.

This explains the bizarre experience I had last year where I needed some keys copied and saw there was a locksmith just down the street so I went down there and couldn't find it. I called to get directions and had the strangest 10 minute conversation with someone who swore up and down they were sitting right there at a real place but could not explain to me how to find it when I was standing "right outside."

Hmm, hadn't heard about that one.

i guess this is more likely to happen for one-off work like picking or replacing a lock versus other kinds of business relationship with a higher chance of recurring business --- in the former situation perhaps it doesn't matter so much to burn your reputation by screwing over the client in a one-shot deal

> Locksmith scams have been reported in the U.S.,[8][9][3][10][11] the U.K.,[12][13] and New Zealand.[14][15][16]

Blimey, I thought it only widespreads in Germany.

The locksmith problem on Google Maps is much less severe than it used to be, for a variety of reasons. Spam listings still exist, but it's less systematic than it used to be -- you no longer see one on every intersection of Manhattan, for instance.

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

What if you required 7 hours for a listing to go live?

The Maps folks played (and are almost certainly still playing) this game of cat and mouse with the spammers. Google comes up with better defenses, and the spammers come up with cleverer spam. I just found the cron job iteration of that cycle particularly memorable and amusing. I don't want to share anything else because I'm sure they still use some of the strategies they used back then, and it's better not to publicize them.

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.

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.

You are begging the question, explaining their approach as a success instead of explaining how it is a success.

Why not have both? Still allow users to submit their own listings but (like twitter/Instagram) have an additional verification process which gives business a "blue tick" if verified.

Copied from another comment of mine:

> 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.

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.

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.

Perhaps scaling to Google-size is the problem.

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.

Wikipedia seems to be an example of humans scaling.

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

Because it's actually billions 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.

If it's impossible to provide human support for a system, and if it's possible to automatically exploit the system to affect a nontrivial fraction of users, then perhaps the system shouldn't have billions of users?

There's resilience in diversity.

> then perhaps the system shouldn't have billions of users

How do you imagine Google Maps achieving that? Telling people "oh, sorry, can't serve you today"?

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.

> 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.

Google Maps does allow any user to submit edit request for place details (opening hours etc) and flag suspect entries. I guess one could be upset about this attempt to get users to work for free, but personally I don’t consider exploitative because (a) verifying local business is actually far easier for local people compared to anyone Google could hire and (b) Google Maps is such a useful product that the distinction to, for example, Wikipedia is less obvious than the simple for-profit/non-profit designation makes it out to be.

> What Google's doing is harder and more nuanced -- they want to accurately capture the world as it exists around you right now.

I challenge that. I do not believe it is true. Google wants to be the go-to directory for spatial queries so that they can display their ads and make tons of money. The quality of the data is irrelevant after a certain level, as long as there is no viable alternative or people just blindly trust Google. Google Maps' data is quantity over quality by a wide margin.

Google is a huge organization. It is possible for Larry or Sundar to have a 30 year plan that involves Maps making money while every engineer working on Maps day to day (including Director and VP-level people) cares deeply about product quality and has the freedom to actually put a lot of resources towards that.

I agree about quantity over quality -- the product strategy boils down to "collect lots of data and build models with it". In the short term, each new feature has middling quality data with middling quality models. But over time they get better and better. It's just Maps keeps adding new features that are at that early, kind of crappy stage, and you forget how much the really polished ones used to suck.

> Vast majority of submitters could be cheaply verified and for small number of potential spammers

Yeah, okay sure. I'm sure all the engineers working on this product at google have never considered anything you wrote before.

If there was a cheap, easy way to block spammers and meet all their other constraints, I'm sure they'd have done it by now.

No matter what you do, if there is money involved, the scammers will eventually work around whatever you have in place to stop them. It is a constant, never ending game of whack-a-mole.

This is laughably ridiculous and not scalable at all. Stores close and prop up all the the time. Not everyone thinks of signing up for google maps. And besides where is the manpower to do verification of millions of stores every day? It’s very easy think something is easy until you actually think of the real world details.

That is a great story, at Blekko my first attempt at getting rid of people trying to exploit the index was to ban any address that did more than 100 queries per second, that got a bunch. Then they start showing up again, at 99 queries per second :-). So I lower it to 50, same pattern but now 49 qps, then set it to 10 qps, they would limbo in under the wire again. They would also start using bot nets to send their query from different PCs in different places (all the same query though, typically looking for ecommerce or wordpress templates with known exploits) We would nail them by finding all the machines that made the same query, then we could just start killing any query that asked for more than page 10 of the results, etc.

For a while I pondered if I could use my ability to change their behavior by changing my rules, to get them to actually create a set of behaviors that would unmask their C&C servers but not enough free time for that.

You could start sending fake results after they exceed the ~100 queries, they will probably stop exploiting it.

Yeah, "hellbanning" scammers is a good idea, instead of giving them a simple 401 code. Increasing the cost of their scam is the best mechanism.

This is a good idea, actually -- make it impossible to distinguish a banned request from a succesful request. At least that could delay the discovery period, as would randomizing the request limit.

I've wondered if a web server or proxy in something like Erlang would be ideal there, where there is little server-side penalty in dragging requests out progressively longer.

With the lightweight processes, the cost per should be very, very low, and basically make it easier to Turing tarpit the scammers.

There are public records for businesses. I just learned from another comment that locksmiths are state licensed.

Wouldn't those data be useful for fraud detection and prevention?

Are the records all of the following: 1) structured 2) available via web API 3) consistent across jurisdictions 4) reasonably up to date

I'm guessing they're not. Google has had hundreds of really smart engineers with an effectively unlimited infrastructure budget working on Maps spam for a decade. If it were easy to solve once and for all, they would have.

There are at least a dozen companies that aggregate and resell that data. I'm familiar with LexisNexus (nee Seisent). I'm certain Google could do it too.

there was a good technical reason for this at the time

I gather there's a number of selfish business reasons for it instead. Google no longer gets my benefit of the doubt in these situations. They won't solve it, because solving it costs money.

> 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.

A few years ago I did a bit of PPC for plumbers in London the CPC was over £30.

And the fake business scams have been well known for well over a decade.

So how do they make money bidding on those keywords?

Assuming a 20% conversion rate, which is probably very generous, that's £150 per customer. Is an average plumber call in London many times more expensive than that then?

If the price is driven up by scammers, I assume they pay with stolen credit cards, etc.

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.

Why should a Catholic School be advertising on Google?

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

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).

> 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.

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.

What is an "advanced education for grade schoolers"?

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

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.

My local public school did not have advanced placement classes, only regular and support for learning disabilities.

At least it had support for the learning disabled.

This cpc could be perfectly normal, one of those keywords where the prices have always been insane.

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.

Hopefully. I'd happily pay someone for curated listings and reviews (we don't seem to have something like Consumer Reports over in the EU; at least I don't know of anything). Everything that's not either a recommendation from a person you know or community forums around a particular niche seems to be thoroughly gamed.

There's the Stiftung Warentest in Germany (test.de).

Which? magazine in the UK.

There's nothing EU-wide, but many countries have their own versions. In Sweden there's "Råd & Rön" which was previously published by the government consumer advocacy agency and now by an independent Consumer's Association.

See this link for a list of EU national organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Consumer_Organisa...

Juicing engagement necessarily comes at the expense of trustworthiness.

(I initially inadvertently typoed "truthworthiness", which I think is more apt.)

The problem is that a tech company like Google is incredibly valuable for a simple reason- their marginal cost is ~$0. They have a fixed cost to run the service, relatively tiny marginal costs and massively higher marginal revenue so it scales fantastically.

If you want a curated recommendation site then your marginal cost is going to be high - every geographic location you want to be in you're going to need to find every single business and invest significant time to investigate them. That time investigating all the coffee shops in Boston isn't going to help you win customers in Minnesota. That's a perfectly fine business, but it's not going to scale well and when you do finally review every coffee shop in Minnesota, Google is going to crawl all the data on your website and stick a card on its search results with all the information killing your site overnight. This has happened before.

Because the high-value method doesn't have a nice business model, the companies that attempt it all either die due to being ripped off, being unable to scale, or get seduced by the easy growth of automated & user-generated content.

The scaling is when you are big enough that businesses want to be listed on your site. Then, rather than letting them put up whatever, you start curating submissions.

If you can break the maps moat of 'everyone uses it' then it doesn't matter if the marginals of maps are better, because people won't use the inferior product.

> 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.

OSM has a community in most places. Nobody really cares about google.

A few years ago some idiot marked up pretty much every walk way in my town as a cycle way. As a keen cyclist who lives in a town with a somewhat poor provision for cycling, this is somewhat irritating as it makes our local government look like it is doing well.

I followed the feedback link and reported a whole heap of these, including links to Streetview showing the "No Cycling" signs in some places. I got automated replies to say that someone would deal with my report - but nothing happended. They are all still showing up.

Perhaps even Google doesn't care about Google.

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.

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

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.

If you can make it a as addicting as pokémon go, it might work. It looks like they are trying since you get some points for "playing"

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.

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.

Market share has something to do with it too. If as many people used OSM as use Google Maps, I'm sure that it would become just as bad.

OSM's Slack is full of people patrolling spammy SEO edits and stuff. It's swiftly dealt with.

If the problem were much larger, it might overwhelm the people currently cleaning it up, but if OSM were higher profile, it would also presumably attract more volunteers.

Crucially, it would empower the people wronged by spam to do something about it, which is precisely the opposite of what Google's system does.

No, but mostly because nobody directly uses OSM. They all use Google.

Same with Wikipedia. Wikipedia has been gamed a bit but the excellent moderators have kept many things at bay. I don't think it's impossible for someone like Encyclopedia Brittanica (an online version) to resurface.

There was a situation that happened in Thailand, where Grab (a ride-sharing company), outsourced OSM edits, and the company making the changes was doing via satellite pictures, and opposed to ground-truthing.

See https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/grab-maps-osm-thailand-sou...

Were the Yellow Pages ever actually curated? It's been a very long time now, but back in high school I did some freelance computer repair work by making up a business name and putting it in the Yellow Pages with my cell phone number. As far as I can recall, there was no validation of anything other than that the check I wrote them was good.

That’s validation in of itself. Google does this with Chrome Apps — you pay $5 to publish.

The curation for yellow pages was more indirect than anything.

A) your check cleared

B) you managed to work with the yellow pages company to get your ad right

C) you managed to keep your phone number operating between the time you placed the ad, and the time I opened the book to use it -- probably at least a couple of months for layout and printing, plus the up to a year before the next printing.

Just curious - what's wrong with Angie's List? It seems a little harder to create an account (they actually did a small background check on me and called me on the phone to ask some questions when I signed up - it was kind of creepy), so it seems to cut down on the random postings from paid post farms and fake reviews you get on places like Amazon, Yelp, etc.

Like Yelp, Angie's List businesses can pay for more prominent placement, and AL uses dark UI patterns to make it seem like they're somehow more legitimate than other reviewers, when in fact they just got there due to paying more. Same with Yelp.

One of the worst experiences I've ever had with a contractor was with an electrician who had 117 A+ reviews on Angie's List (K&K Electric of Rockville, MD). They took 7 hours to complete a 1.5 hour job (installing a 40 foot cable run for a car charger), then threatened to put a lien on my house because I wanted to pay less as a result of the experience. It was a total shouting match (full disclosure: part of the tension was that I had to pay them 40 days later since I was out of the country for 4 weeks). On top of all that, the permit was rejected because they didn't properly label the high voltage, high amp breakers.

Now I realize they probably paid for those "117 A+" reviews.

I wonder if China has a social credit score API that companies can integrate to prevent sign-ups from known bad actors. Would be an interesting concept.

ReCAPTCHA v3?

There's lots of great info on Yelp and Google reviews, if you know how to filter it. Two distinct filters are required, actually, one for the corrupt, and another for the clueless.

Corrupt reviewer are the fake business locations, paid shills, employees, relatives, customers trading a 5-star review for a 10% discount. Smoke these out with the following tells. Review history: absent or all 5-star. Text content: description of service absent or generic description of service, zero negative or neutral specifics, hyperbolic declarations of loyalty.

Clueless reviewers leave easier tells, but can be more plentiful. Review history is bipolar, all single- or five-star. Text content shows misunderstanding of what the vendor actually does, expressed with many errors of grammar, and irrelevant detail. May be excessively negative, due to unreasonable expectations of the vendor.

So, reading a good sample of reviewer's text is required. This does consume a few more minutes of your day.

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.

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.

+1 for street names in view port. I tend to research the route and then put away the phone when I'm on my bike. What is the name of the street where I need to turn right?

Also, if I have to go straight ahead for a long time, the street names might change several times, but I don't care much. I'd rather know I need to go straight for 5km, than go straight for 100m, then go straight again for 800m ....

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.

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.

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

It doesn’t work very well in cities. Here is an example from DC. http://i68.tinypic.com/152ygx0.jpg

I'm not sure why or when. But I often find no matter how far I zoom into a street, it refuses to show me any street name. This is even if it's literally the only street visible on my screen.

I had this happen roughly two weeks ago on my iPad with multiple people around me all scratching their heads. I look at the same location today and I see the street name....

Same area, Google Maps on modern Android: https://ibb.co/18wVw9k 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.

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

It happens when there are other points or an overlay. I think the buffer they put around text boxes suppresses the street.

In notice this on my street, as there’s a business, park and firehouse. Most of the time the street name is blocked. Also see it a lot in places like Queens with irregular streets with lots of points.

Just tried it in Chrome, Firefox, and on my phone.

Can't get the street name for the office that I work in. It's a big street here...but nada. Have to shift over a few screens to get the name to finally show up.

Obviously, I know what street I work on. But the problem is that this happens consistently whenever I have a location pin in GMaps (i.e., destination, etc.)--the street of the pin rarely shows up unless I play around with the view.

Street names is definitely borked.

Google doesn't need to go for any of the low-hanging fruit because their PoI data is still the best of the Google Maps / Apple Maps / Maps.me trifecta. Apple Maps is slowly improving their PoI and other data, but for mobile devices is only available on iOS.

"Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being almost, but not quite, good at being a map"

Perhaps this is a general phenomenon of our society that is increasing, being almost but not quite competent, because producing the "minimum viable product" is the most economically efficient approach and due to general improvement in data analysis and optimization, companies are getting better at substituting some exploitation of cognitive biases for unnecessary competence.

Perhaps Google's UX experts have decided street names are as important as call and SMS timestamp. That is to say, not important at all.

Even when street names are in view, they are often illegible: tiny font, overprinted on multiple lines & styling, etc.

Why don't you suggest changes to fix these some of these mistakes yourself? You can add a new location, report wrong business hours, etc.

Not the OP, but I'd much rather contribute that information to OpenStreetMap so that it's freely available to anyone who wants to use it (including Google!).

Google's data is copyrighted and open street maps is not per their policy "If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence" [0]. They even mention google maps in their privacy policy: "OSM contributors are reminded never to add data from any copyrighted sources (e.g. Google Maps or printed maps) without explicit permission from the copyright holders."

So no they cannot use it and a quick search looks like apple still relies on Tomtom which is also copyrighted [1] and thus they cannot use it either.

[0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ahx4il/where_does_ap...

Google and Apple are both free to use OSM data (which is of course copyrighted). But the don't want to because they can't abide by the license terms.

Apple does use OSM in some countries like Ukraine IIRC. They are free to do so. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel...

Although their attribution is leaning on the minimalist side.

Turn by turn navigation in Apple Maps in Denmark is OSM based. (If I remember the talk from the Apple engineer at State of the Map 2018)

Why should they work for Google for free? Google Maps is a business and should pay for the accuracy of its data. Or OP can contribute to OpenstreetMap to the point it will contain enough and accurate data to be a preferred source for this kind of information. It won't automatically solve the problem with scammers, but with several users policing the accuracy of the data, instead of only Google being the gatekeeper, several solutions become possible. For instance, the Wikipedia model.

I understand your point, but Google maps is also a useful and free. I think contributions to both OSM and Google is worthy and helps everyone. I personally use Google maps in most cases and contribute back to it, I see no issues with this.

This is just an anecdote, but I've alerted Google to a particular mistake in Maps multiple times and it's never been fixed.

A light rail station in Portland is accessed from the bridge above it, but Google Maps is unaware that they're connected. Because of that Maps leaves it out of directions; commuting options are completely incorrect. If you manually select it as a destination it will give you ludicrous directions like this: https://goo.gl/maps/XYTZwNiRkipzNHse9

Stranger still, the northbound side of the same station connects just fine.

That's worse than weird, that's downright dangerous. There are no sidewalks on that street, and cars travel at 55-75 mph on it. There's also no way to get from the street to the station; the overhead bridge is the only way.

That's pretty shocking, that station has been there for three years.

It gives a disclaimer that walking directions might not reflect real conditions.

Lol. And google ignores those edits and requests. As I said in a prior comment, I live seconds away from Google on Moffett Field and my address is still wrong on Google maps, but correct in Apple Maps. The building I live in was built decades ago with a street that was there when Moffett was a blimp base in the 1930s.

The suggestion process is very unfulfilling. Between the super long delays and then never seeing the results, it's not worthwhile.

Agreed. Furthermore, Google Maps is full of fake reviews with only the option to "Flag as inappropriate" and no option to properly report a fake review with supporting evidence - which I would do, if the option was there!

It's not just the maps. The signal to noise ratio on search has gotten worse too. It used to be you'd get your good results buried underneath obviously bullshit content farms doing absurd SEO.

Now it's buried underneath somewhat relevant content that is either manipulative/sensationalist, actively trying to spread disinformation, or just hosts a very generic pabulum version of what you're looking for. Instead of trying to find useful information amidst irrelevant nonsense I feel like I spend a lot more time now trying to sift out useful information for relevant nonsense, which is much harder.

This has been seriously grinding at me lately. Google is pretty much useless for me personally as a search engine lately. I find it so frustrating that I just end up not wanting to search for things.

- It ignores that I tick "Australia Only", and shows me endless US results and international results despite me KNOWING there's Australian results for the thing I'm searching for, eg products in a store. I have to use site:.au in nearly every search.

- It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't.

- The sheer amount of spam in the results now is mind boggling. Searching for lots of common products or projects now is like trying to find that one email you know is in your spam folder in Gmail. Pages and pages of crap until you get the page you're after.

- and so much more I could write a book

I feel like Google Search is no longer about giving a user the page they want as quickly as possible, but to get a user to click through as many bullshit ad-filled content farms as they can BEFORE giving them the real result purely to make more money for Google. Or at least some point somewhere between Hanlon's Razor and "We know it's broken but we won't fix it because we make more money this way"... and closer to the later.

> It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't.

I noticed a large uptick in this kind of behavior for the queries I was making a year or two ago, and it's what finally spurred me to make the switch over to DuckDuckGo. It's extremely frustrating how Google search will ignore a quoted term and instead return useless results for a different, but more popular, term.

It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise.

Here is a tip (I forget the attribution) that seems to work for me: If you put &tbs=li:1 at the end of your search URL, you'll get verbatim results.

My experience has been very similar, and to this day I'm still dismayed at the negative opinion people have of Apple Maps. Most of the people I've asked haven't used it in years, instead just defaulting to Google Maps.

I've also encountered a surprising number of people that just assume all maps are Google Maps. Kind of like the ones that don't know there's email besides Gmail.

Shows how important first impressions are. Apple maps was terrible on release and Apple deleted google maps from people’s phones when it came out.

I was visiting Costa Rica at the time and the small town I was in which was thoroughly mapped in google maps didn’t exist in Apple maps at all. An infuriating experience that made me never want to use Apple maps again.

Apple didn’t “delete Google Maps” when Apple maps came out.

The Maps app was written by Apple from day one. It used Google’s data. Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data. Apple had to either find other sources for map data or give up user privacy.

> Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data.

As I recall the reporting at the time, it was a choice of either more data or more money for turn-by-turn navigation.

> Apple maps was terrible on release

Yeah, I remember when, just after release, on a trip between Woodland, CA, and Davis, CA, it decided to route me through Woodland Hills, CA. (Not “it mistook a Woodland address for Woodland Hills, but it routed from Woodland to Davis by way of Woodland Hills, adding ~800 miles to an ~12 mile trip.)

If only you'd followed its directions, you'd have gone on an amazing days-long adventure that ended in your finding a fortune in buried gold. Alas, you second-guessed the navigation genie.

I've got a positive opinion of Apple Maps, and would preferentially use it (I'd even pay a subscription fee for it) if it were available on Android. I can't use iPhones for various reasons.

It was terrible when it first came out. Has it really changed?

For instance, a nearby road intersects with another road at a cloverleaf. The exits are marked road2 North and road2 South just a short distance from each other.

But apple maps directions just said "exit right road2" or something like that. I submitted a change at the very beginning and it never changed. I could probably check again.

In general dedicated systems are WAY better at these things, probably because you don't want to piss off a paying customer (who may be a car manufacturer)

My new Audi built in nav is far worse than Apple Maps. Just an anecdote, but still a data point. Many car navs use aging Tom Tom data.

I recently bought a garmin portable gps for a car without nav and it's really quite good.

Very clear directions when navigating, shows you and tells you which lane to be in, live traffic, touchscreen interface, voice command. Everything is offline so it's more private than apple :)

Not totally related to your point, but it seems to me that Google doesn't care about the quality of Google Maps as much as Apple cares about the quality of Apple Maps.

For example, my house had its address changed by our county in late November when a new street was cut nearby and the location of our driveway changed due to right of way. Our address was updated in the USPS AMS database back in January. As you can imagine, I wanted Map providers to have my most updated information as soon as possible so that people could easily find my address when I gave it to them and so when UPS or Fedex people look up my address on their phones, they can find it.

In Google Maps, I've attempted to contribute an edit several times: each time with links to county tax data, county records, county maps, city maps, and a personal statement explaining the situation. Every time Google rejects it without action or any message other than "not applied". I'm pretty sure there is someone manually reviewing these requests as it always takes a variable amount of time before I get the rejection. It's really disappointing to put so much effort into editing someone else's data - for free - and have it be rejected outright without any sort of explanation.

Now, I went and I did the exact same thing with Apple Maps! My edit was applied within a week and the Map is updated - iPhone users can easily find my house. It seems to me that while maybe Apple spent several years playing catch up with Google, at this point they are hungry to do well by their customers and are extremely responsive to quality concerns. I've not personally had a problem with Apple Maps in several years and don't see myself leaving Apple's platform any time soon

Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them.

Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city.

However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.

Queens isn’t a city, it’s a borough/county that used to be a bunch of little towns. It’s like asking for directions in Boston using Suffolk, MA.

Queens was like Long Island of the 1950s... the house I grew up in had been a 250 acre farm, with 50 acres left as late as 1898. There are also plenty of dupe street addresses in Queens, especially if you leave a hyphen out. The reference to “Flushing” is a legacy left over from the pre-zipcode era.

A sample of some of the complexity: https://gothamist.com/2011/08/21/does_queens_still_need_hyph...

I’m well aware. But every other map handles this correctly except Google Maps. It’s not that hard.

"Apple Maps on Android" will be the next "iTunes on Windows".

Their instance on using Play services for location rather than the GPS API.

I've been impressed with Apple Maps lately - like how whenever you scroll, the temp and AQI are auto updated! So killer.

> Street names are still impossible to discover.

It's a map. Street names should be first class citizens. But alas. Google knows better than I do.

> 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 made the trip out to Coney Island from Manhattan only to find it closed that day....

My experience mirrors yours exactly. And as of about two years ago, Apple maps has been more than sufficient as a replacement - they’re actually better now, in my opinion.

The new iOS 13 street view is vastly better than Google now in terms of quality and fidelity. Apple isn’t playing around when it comes to improving Maps.

Some more stuff that never seems to be getting fixed:

- When making turns in complex road netwrok, they don't zoom in. I can't tell you how many times I have taken wrong turns because zoom level is too coarse while making turns.

- They often give routes with way too many turnings as if making a turn has no cost. Combine this with above and in many places Google Maps is a hell to use.

- No one is still bothering to add select scenic route option. European map service like viamichelin.com does this very nicely. So many wasted road trips.

- Little things like after trip is "complete", they suddenly zoom out all the way. This is utterly nonsensical. Most of the time I still actually need to find the place in dense urban area after parking.

- The "Save" feature allows no annotation, icons, coloring. They even chose default color and icon so that its hard to distinguish.

- No way to find restaurants or businesses using more useful filters like most reviewed as opposed to stupid highest rating.

The permanently closed point is the most salient in my mind. There was a business that was closed for, what I was told, over 6 months in my area; Google said it was still open. Later I checked out the business on Google maps, but this time the hours were updated to say closed every day.

A lot of things have changed in this team since its long gone golden days. Previously it was run by Marissa Mayer and she was given essentially a blank check (being ex-girlfriend of founder also didn't hurt). She went out in massive spending spree and bought tons of startups, started streetview project, got much better aerial data and so on. Thanks to her aggressive investment and ambition, she managed to make Google Maps better than maps many government themselves had at the time. After she had to report to Huber and she left, the team had been in turmoil with not much of ambition and just usual executives thinking about how to make profits. So vast amount of affort in recent years has gone into those stuff and less into making maps unconditionally better. There is also no competition now that Apple Maps have pretty much given up matching the coverage and details of Google Maps.

This is exactly the kind of things we need to worry about when monopoly invest in making super good "free stuff". They will put ton of money to leapfrog but then they will realize that they have created massive capital barrier for others to enter the market. So they will now just loiter and squeeze the customers out for profits.

A very simple feature they're missing is filtering by what is open now (or by the time I can arrive). Would be super useful when searching for a restaurant or store.

This is an option actually

I stand corrected, wasn't when I tried last time.

I've almost completely switched to Apple maps. I have to say, right now, my biggest annoyance is no matter how far I zoom in, the street text keeps getting smaller so I can read it!

Maybe this isn't ideal, but setting the system text size in Settings should make the street labels larger. You can put text size adjustment in Control Center too for easier access.

Thanks, I will try that.

>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.

I swore I was seeing the same bug. With some searches I found the news articles stating the business had actually permanently closed.

I wonder if the problem in some cases is: A) Users don't realize when a search is open it hides some results.

B) Some business are getting flagged as closed inappropriately to avoid showing them?

I also switched to Apple Maps and have not looked back.

> Street names are still impossible to discover.

Let's not forget State Routes and similar. Okay, so Main Street is also State Route 434, but 99.9999% of people call it Main Street and may not even be aware it's SR 434.

I just finished a 2 month road trip and used a mixture of Google Maps and Apple Maps and have to agree, Google Maps was surprisingly sub par. This really surprised me.

The largest offender was routing from an Airbnb in Northern California to a restaurant nearby about 14 miles away. Google put us on a path that would take 3 hours! I had to double check to make sure it wasn't on walking or public transit mode. It was the most convoluted thing I've ever seen. Every time I re-entered it gave the same ridiculous route.

Very strange routing like this happened with regularity. Apple Maps had no such issues (and routed properly around closures). Add on the fact that the reviews in Google Maps are worthless because everything gets 5 stars, as we got further into the trip we pretty just only used Apple Maps.

I live at Moffett Field, literally a stone’s throw from Google HQ and my street address doesn’t show up on Google maps despite repeated attempts to contact and correct. My street shows up, but not the actual number. Apple Maps however, is perfectly accurate for my address. Essentially in Google’s backyard and they can’t get it right. So it makes me suspicious of the quality of the entire system.

This rant about a mobile app seems only tangentially (at best) related to the article/topic. You don't actually discuss anything in the article, but seemed to have keyed off of 'google maps' in the title to inspire your off topic rant.

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?"

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?

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.

So they essentially pulled what that shed did: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

While I know YP (the physical book kind) is/was different, and I admit I’m ignorant about this question, was there a significant issue with impersonation and fraud? (I.E. Acme Pest Exterminators, not being Acme pest exterminators?)

If an old timey business could filter reasonably well against fraud, one would think a modern leading tech organization would be better positioned to handle this problem.

I think the scale was quite a bit different back then. Getting a listing the in the Yellow Pages required money and a physical form. Changing the details on Google Maps is, as far as I can tell, a matter of seconds and doesn't cost a thing.

If this friction provides a better end user experience at a nominal expense of businesses but punishment of fraudsters, I’m okay with that.

Scale is not an excuse. There were many regional YPs. Google could break things down if that helped them too.

Oh yeah, I'm totally okay with it too. I was just offering a possible explanation for why fraud was less of an issue for YP than it is for Google.

>To verify you need evidence and a way to prove it is correct. Proof is hard.

What's wrong with verification via snail mail? Too slow? Can't automate it?

If you use Google My Business they absolutely do verify your address by mail. Went through this process a few months ago.

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.

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.

> Proof is hard

I would argue that it can be made much less hard. Vast majority of cases can be verified by online presence, phone calls, domain emails etc. Minority of cases, like locksmith, are not easy to verify. In those cases you impose proof of work. Meaning that those folks must perform extra work which makes it expensive for them to keep repeating. For example, you can charge them $100 to run third party background check, require them to give TINs and other LLC documentation etc.

>For example, you can charge them $100 to run third party background check,

How do you prevent this from becoming a form of abusive rent-seeking? i.e. randomly removing a businesses' credentials and then charging them the cost of a background check + a small fee to "verify"

> 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.

A cynic would say it is being treated as an optimization problem from the perspective of maximizing revenue:

If we have the number of users switching away from Maps as a function of fake listings and fake listing up-bidding is allowed, how many blatantly fake listings (not even borderline cases) per query can we allow to maximize revenue before the costs of users switching away outweighs the gain from fake listings?

More transparency in the process for removing fake listings would be nice to alleviate the concern that this is what Google is doing.

They generally do require verification, they mail you a letter with a code you need to verify the address and continue with your listing. At my agency we've had so many clients that don't inform the person collecting mail, and they just throw it away...leaving the client wondering why we haven't updated their listings.

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).

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.

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.

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?

> Google could send their whole profile to law enforcement.

I would venture a guess that law enforcement won't do a damn thing. Law enforcement will claim it's not their jurisdiction. Or they'll claim that it's too small of an offense to worry about and too busy to do anything about it. Or, damnably, law enforcement won't understand the technical aspect and just file a report and do nothing anyway.

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.

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.

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

You expect the FTC to care about consumers?

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...

Interesting. My first impression is, "That's crazy." Stating a fact ("such-and-such business is at thus-and-such address and has this phone number and here is a picture of the building") should not be removable by force. I can see the point about selling ads for it, of course. Can a business force a (physical) map company to remove the label of their business from the map?

But then I remember the whole right to be forgotten and just realize things don't make sense.

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.

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.

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.

I was a local guide until the Maps API price increase screwed over my use case. Somehow that killed my motivation.

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".

In the Google Maps app there is a button that lets you confirm/check-in your visit at a business. Also, you can confirm visits in the Timeline feature.

I don't know why those features are there or what Google is using the information for, but it seems like it could be used to verify businesses by crowd-sourcing.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Home businesses are annoying, yeah. The vast majority of them aren't open to the public, so there's no reason for them to appear on a map.

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.

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?

Do any of those provide enough incentive for scammers to care about? Why would a scammer care to get fake data into any of those services?

> 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.)

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Don't be evil, just rent to it.

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

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.

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

Alternative viewpoint: tech has benefited from a free ride of "doing no evil" for a long time and they are now being overseen the way multi-billion dollar companies should be. If a service is so badly moderated that their customers can get scammed by fake companies regularly, doesn't that require some kind of reporting?

That was actually what I was suggesting, though apparently poorly.

The techlash is well deserved and long overdue. WSJ and NYT are about as polar opposite as mainstream newspapers can get[1], both are exceedingly critical of at least Google, Facebook, and Twitter, if not all of FAANG and Silicon Valley.

Not that Murdoch may not have his own specific axe to grind, and not to discount the spite that many traditional media publishers have over loss of ads revenues.

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Notes:

1. I'm not saying they're extremes of the spectrum. But within the mainstream they tend to define at least mainstream scope. And TV, radio, and online are a whole 'nother story.

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.

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

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.

Right, and I'm not trying to say it is. Tim Bray first called it out that I recall, in September of 2019:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/09/20/Tech-is-E...

Though of course others have been critical for far longer. Yochai Benkler comes to mind, along with Eben Moglen, Bruce Schneier, and RMS.

Or it could be that Google is one of the world's largest companies and is actively changing almost every facet of our lives, and so these sorts of things happen.

If Google was a smaller business involved in a single industry, then your conspiracy theory might have merit. But it seems perfectly logical that as Big G's tentacles reach deeper into the lives of everyone on the planet that it's going to come under increased scrutiny.

It's like people forget that they are multi-billion dollar companies, top 10 on the stock market. Of course we will talk about them, constantly. They have a huge influence on our economy, society, etc..

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