Google gave our business listing to a competitor

It might sound different, but it's really not. For years the Norwegian state colleted data on certain groups and individuals for Communist activity. When some of them understood what was going on, they naturally wanted to see the information being collected. Soon it became a campaign called "I want to see my folder."

And this is essentially what Google has. They have folders on people whose information they have mined. Perhaps they may sell it, but it remains questionable whether they even have the right to sell other people's data, due to confidentiality.

Now, of course, perhaps Google has acquired some permission to do this, and perhaps even user permission, but then it should be obvious that Google is indeed getting the assets from a voluntary customer, and that some kind of exchange is going on, that should be valuable for both parties.

Even if Google has the right to mine those data, the people being mined are obviously "paying" Google, or being useful to Google, which the act of paying essentially is. Thus they're essentially giving up something, to get something else. That should entitle them to at least some measure of support, and some measure of fairness when it comes to your own data and how your organizational structure is modelled.

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

We’ve been told over and over and over and over again we are somehow paying with our data even after they refuse any other form of payment, so this seems like a meaningless distinction.

I mean, I've seen understaffed, shitty-service companies since I was a kid. How is this unique? Fuck them all.

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 Can you throw some GUI on it?", the documentation is short and often either outdated or did not cover certain cases in the first place, and "what to do if this doesn't solve your problem" is rare.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.

it sounds like there needed to be (needs to be?) tooling to allow customer support to make these changes. Fixing these kinds of things really shouldn't be something that engineers should have to do manually.

This wouldn't matter if Google weren't a de facto monopoly.

If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing.

Got a typo in a business listing, wrong opening hours, &c.? Sure, you can fix that.

Got a road segment slightly wrong? OK, you can straighten it out.

Any other case where the underlying map data or presentation is wrong? Nope, you can’t report it, and any attempt to report the issue by the channels that are available will fail to have any effect.

And that’s the problem, Maps just doesn’t seem to be interested in providing, y’know, maps. It’s focused on being a business directory instead.

Take https://www.google.com/maps/place/Navarre+VIC+3384,+Australi... as an example: that pin and label on the map is almost 5km south of Navarre, because they seem to have taken the entire suburb area (which in rural areas is regularly many kilometres across) and picked a point on its boundary—I dunno, maybe the furthest point south, maybe just the start position of the polyline—rather than taking a sane point that represents where the town actually is (e.g. its post office) or even a midpoint in the suburb area.

When you look through rural areas you find a substantial fraction of the labels are wrong by several kilometres. Head south to the next town, Landsborough, and it’s marked 4km down the road from where it actually is. I’ve seen some places 10km off the mark.

I’ve attempted to report the Navarre case six or seven times over the last few years while living there, by three different ways (none of which is properly applicable), and it’s still stubbornly in the wrong place.

(Yes, I’m mentioning this here on the off chance that someone relevant will see it and pay attention.)

And why is that? Google is not a poor company, can't they add a separate data support team for Maps which is a pretty important application? Is Google that cheap?

Why should feature engineers work on data support? I understand they implement automatic validation for data, but in addition to that there should be a separate data team which checks data manually.

Well, they are startup, low on cash so we should understand. As they start making money, no doubt they'll step up. /s

Google should shunned by us and investigated for antitrust.

I mean, from one perspective, sure, it'd be nice if there were a team of thousands to handle this problem.

But from another perspective, you just said there were a dozen people staffed to handle a single feature of a single product. Out of how many features, out of how many products?

My first job was at a start up back in the comparison shopping era where our goal was to get every product for sale on the internet into one place. For several years, I was responsible for all of indexing and search; another engineer was responsible for everything related to the front-end, another for everything related to crawling and scraping, and a forth worked on a variety of projects. Four engineers to cover every store's inventory in the world.

So, you know, coming from that world, the idea that there are a dozen people responsible for just business hours is crazy.

(For completeness, our engineering team fluctuated as high as a dozen when the company was flush with investor cash, down to four for a long stretch when the company went bankrupt for awhile, and then up to a half dozen or so when the company was profitable for a span.)

If we looked at a breakdown of whose info was accurate and whose was incorrect, there'd probably be some harmful biases in there, is that right? Isn't there some sense of responsibility here? Like, it's understandable how difficult it is to do this in a way where there aren't a small fraction of people being harmed, but that's not really a defense that they aren't causing harm. It seems like a defense along the lines of "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys."

I suggested a edit to revert the “closed today” hours and sent a picture of the hours. The edit was somehow rejected immediately.

As a “local guide” who volunteers to improve listings of local businesses, this left a sour taste in my mouth.

I also don’t believe that out of the 50 Googlers who were there that day, not one tried correcting the “error”. This leads me to believe it was malicious.

If Google was a scrappy startup with a few dozen employees, people might be more sympathetic. But Google has hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal to fix the problem. It could purchase a small country and employ every person in that country to fix its problems. But Google won't admit that people can do what algorithms can't, and that's what causes Google to get so much hatred from the public.

Besides, this is so far from HN's purpose that nobody should even be considering adding this feature.

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.

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?