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.
Since it’s a conflict of interest, likely Google will do little about it.
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.
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.
Scale is not an excuse. There were many regional YPs. Google could break things down if that helped them too.
What's wrong with verification via snail mail? Too slow? Can't automate it?
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.
I think you're underestimating how hard this is and/or how motivated and smart the scammers are.
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.
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"
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.