Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

(2) How can Google merge a newly created Google Business account with one that has existed for years without checking with the owner of the one that has existed for years? Saying "well, the person who set up the new account made a mistake" is not a good answer.

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

> Of course, AFAIK these people aren't paying Google, so to Google they're not customers

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.

You definitely do pay. Your data is used to target yourself with ads, which advertisers pay a lot for.

Even if you don’t click on ads, anytime you search for something to buy, those ads you see force the merchant you ultimately purchase from to have to buy defensive ads. Those costs get passed back to you in a roundabout way. So google gives you free stuff with one hand and reaches into your back pocket with the other. It’s great because then you have no idea the true cost of that free thing you got.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/google-paid-search-ads-shake...

I think the meaning of OP was they are not paying explicitly, and in that don’t have much contractual entitlement to receive support.

“Paying in data” is a euphemism that we are used for the positive externality we provide when we allow being surveilled on our usage of their system. This is not an explicit transaction, and buried in information asymmetries, corp-speak, abstract terms-of-service banners and whatnot.

Right, so why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect? You won’t even allow me to pay for my own fucking ad slots to get you out of my computer? Seems like... not very neighborly behavior.

Anyway you can see the lack of “support” with the black hole they call end-user product feedback.

> why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect

Because "respect" in this case costs money. And because they can, since precisely the transaction is so tacit. It might take a few more decades until we can make explicit the nature of data and surveillance based transactions. Imagine if your grocery store's loyalty card was used in a way that required saying "do you want to sell the information of what you bought today for $x.xx?" or "you are paying %x more today for this product because we were able to calculate it with the data you or people like you provided in the past, which shows you would pay for it".

I think it is obvious the billions of profit ads businesses are making is not matching their value to the humanity or the productivity of the company. It is a monopolistic game with economies of scale on these little externalities, unpriced transactions that creates that sweet margin. In that scale, you are almost nothing, while "respecting" you doesn't work well. Unless there is PR pressure or a reduction to product usage, there is absolutely no incentive to be better in that regard, while there is all the incentive to grow the userbase, grow the margins, grow the surveillance.

> why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect?

The people they are treating with such disrespect are not customers, just users. That's because Google refuses to even give them the chance to be customers, even though, as you say, they are making Google a lot of money.

Them not being customers doesn't seem like it absolves Google of responsibility. If Google decided to always replace Pepsi with Coke or something similar they'd be in a huge controversy with possible legal ramifications even absent any formal relationship with Coke.

> Of course, AFAIK these people aren't paying Google, so to Google they're not customers, they're just users whose data Google wants to sell.

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.

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

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

> Of course they are

That's facile. The system is designed so that in the aggregate, users will not treat this review information as unreliable. It doesn't matter that a tiny percentage of users have the wherewithal to assess it properly.

The users will not treat the review information as unreliable, you say. But that is no indication of the information's actual reliability, is it? Like saying an unreliable politician is seen as reliable by the people. Yeah, he fooled the voters. Yeah, he's still unreliable in truth.

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

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

Once upon a time I had a business phone line. It came with a free Yellow Pages listing in the category of my choice. If I wanted a display ad it was more, but the listing itself was included in the slightly higher price I paid for having a business line instead of a home line.

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

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

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

Plying people with alcohol seems very unethical.

I don't know about minimum effort. Some of Google's product teams have focused their best work on limitations that don't make sense. An example: It takes a lot of work to build an entire app ecosystem for Android Auto, only to disable the whole f'n thing if the end user disables Google Voice.

Exactly, Google prefers to automate this sort of thing. Youtube has similar problems and it's equally as impossible to reach a human being to get the problem sorted out.

I don't see how that would be possible for the simple reason that the Yellow Pages couldn't be updated.

But it didnt need to be updated too much since the data had integrity in the first place. Sure, updates are needed since ... changes in the real world so there were yearly issues for that.

Regardless, we live in a time with more possibilities, we can do updates but why loose corectness? With Google it’s not just an isolated case

They should put up a disclaimer “pay us or we’ll sink your business”

I’m right folks! This is glorified blackmail.

Eh, reviews are so full of fakes and mindless angry people that they are unreliable anyway. I don't see this as being the straw that breaks things.

You’re not the business owner who just had his reputation stolen.

And it will be users, not business owners, who decide whether that matters. So far users have accepted everything from Yelp's bullying to DoorDash's grabbing of online real estate, to Amazon's army of fake reviews.

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