Closed, Says Google, but Shops’ Signs Say Open

Google needs a "Name changed to xxxx" option alongside "Permanently Closed" in this situation, with a pointer to the new place.

That's probably a bit too much overhead for something like this. Imagine the number of businesses that close each year, then imagine Google sending a postcard to each.

I've been through the postcard validation, and it's pretty painless. I'd prefer some notification options that includes the ability to receive an email before my location is marked as closed. A thresholding algorithm could be used to detect abuse. If a location is repeatedly marked as closed, but the owner of the listing verifies that they're still open every time, a listing could be flagged for further inspection. Subsequent requests to close could be prompted for more information, which Google staff could then use to take action.

All of this requires more attention from Google, and I'd imagine that the Maps business already runs on pretty thin margins. Google's approach to most of these problems is to use an "85% solution" (I mean that 80% figuratively, not literally). That is, they choose a solution that works for "most" situations, but falls apart when abuse is present, but they don't really care, because those edge cases don't affect their bottom line.

They've acknowledged the problem and said that they are working on fixing it. That's not enough? Nothing good can come from going into more detail than that - both in the PR sense of hoping that the story just dies quietly, but also in an engineering sense.

For example talking about the operational details on how exactly things are verified would just make gaming the system easier. They probably don't know the exact magnitude of the problem, it would take valuable engineering time to come up with even a rough approximation, and it should be obvious that it's better to not comment than to just guess. You probably couldn't give a coherent explanation of why the "not true" doesn't stick without going into very tedious details of the data pipeline and serving infrastructure.

I think the biggest concern is people passing by the interstate with their gps on. One can now imagine literally thousands of people just passing by, and seeing that the place is closed, or maybe not seeing anything at all in their gps screen.