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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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