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Comment by vba616 | Hacker News Reader

>laughing their full heads off every time they think about how there are people who do free work for Google who think they are making the world a better place or something.

So when you go to a store that Google Maps says is open, and find it's closed, you refuse to correct the hours and go "MUHAHAHAHA...I refuse to help Google, take that, corporate scum!"

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Why would I bother checking Google Maps? But basically, yeah. If Google wants my expertise and data collection ability, they can pay me for it. As it stands now they just cold call businesses and ask them with an AI thing.

What other source would you rather check?

OpenStreetMap?

Okay! I just opened OsmAnd and looked up my local supermarket. Sadly, no work hours. And this is a very popular supermarket right next to a train station in central Brooklyn, NY.

The thing is that business owners do update the info on Google Maps, and have an incentive to do so, but only volunteers update OSM.

OSM shines where businesses don't care but volunteers do: trails in a park, non-commercial POIs, etc.

I always check the actual website of the business in question. Search engines are wrong like 40% of the time in my experience.

At a company my wife worked for, the social media department spent half its time fixing store hours, addresses, and map locations in Google Maps and Apple Maps.

I guess it's nice that ordinary people try to do these updates for Big G and Apple. But they're often wrong, or they presume a one-day change is a permanent change, or that it applies to every location on the planet.

What? Why on earth would I correct it?

I'm sure you can figure it out. I believe in you. (And that response is because I'm 100% treating your question in good faith and not "I know why I would, but also I know why I wouldn't and prefer that, so I'll pretend I don't know why I would".)

So the trillion dollar company can be better, of course

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