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.
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.
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.
See this link for a list of EU national organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Consumer_Organisa...
(I initially inadvertently typoed "truthworthiness", which I think is more apt.)
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.
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.
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.
Is OSM equally bad? There's many ways to run a "user-fed" project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/grab-maps-osm-thailand-sou...