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Comment by robotcookies | Hacker News Reader

I had this happen to me. Went to order something for pickup from maps. I thought it was the restaurant's page but the order went through postmates. When I arrived to pick up my order, the staff seemed to think I was an employee of postmates.

Anyway, when I got home I did some searching and found out the restaurant had a different webpage from what I ordered from. The prices I paid were a little higher than the actual business websites. It seems postmates charged me more, taking a cut while doing nothing to make the food or deliver it. What a parasitic business to inject yourself as a third party like that.

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There's been quite a few companies doing some growth hacking, or I guess straight up stealing by putting their url as the url for a restaurant. It's hard to trust anything Google maps tells me since there's no real source of truth.

Zomato needs to be banned from Google maps.

>growth hacking

This is just techbro euphemism for "lie to your users."

This particular instance is definitely lying to users, but in general "growth hacking" isn't necessarily so evil. Like adding "sent with Hotmail" at the bottom of the free email service, or offering a printable certificate of your store's Yelp rating to show off to in-person customers.

I thought it was a euphemism for "lie to your investors"?

Zomato is the worst thing I have seen. I stopped using it and moved to Swiggy. To order from zomato, you need their app, you cannot order from their website. On swiggy, you can either order from their website or app.

I like to order stuff of any service from their website. Usually, the play/app store apps are filled with ads, trackers, spyware.

I had much the same problem, ordered from my favorite local Mexican place for delivery, but Doordash apparently had no agreement with the restaurant, despite holding themselves out as the restaurant. Instead, they posted a menu with incorrect items, incorrect prices and just sent someone to stand in line to order from them.

Needless to say, the food was incorrectly ordered, an hour late and cold. To top it all off, they attempted to charge me for the difference in price. Luckily, I put a stop to this via my credit card, and have boycotted Doordash since.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon amongst the various food delivery companies, despite being obvious fraud.

It's so common you have to assume Google is happy with the way it works. Flowers, locksmiths, tow trucks, etc. all have parasites like that in their industry. Basically anything where you don't need to be there physically is going to have someone trying to game the system to act as a middle man that does nothing.

My mother got scammed by the flowers version by clicking on a Google Ad and not realizing she was dealing with a middleman that was doing nothing more than adding $50 to local prices and calling in orders. And when people that don't realize what's going on feel like they got ripped off, the real business seems to be the one that gets the bad review.

The easiest thing to do is to assume Google is nothing but spam and scams. I'm convinced there's a market opportunity for local web indexes similar to what Yahoo used to be because there's nothing to use for discovery that isn't trying to scam you.

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