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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

Google has forgotten the plot. A quick tangent story follows: I attempted to add a Tesla Supercharger as it went live to Google Maps. I was the very first to pay to recharge at the new location. The process went something like this:

1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes.

2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes.

3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes.

4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute.

5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.

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FWIW, editing OpenStreetMap is very straightforward*, and with that, you're actually contributing to an open data set that everyone is allowed to use, rather than just propping up Google.

(To be fair, on a laptop - I'm sure Google Maps is more straightforward on a phone. But for someone already prepared to invest this much effort, editing OSM should be well within range. And if you just enjoy contributing to maps, for a phone I can highly recommend https://streetcomplete.app.)

Wasn't making street plans from satellite pictures ruled transformative? So if you get an AI to make street plans from Google maps, satellite layer, you're not violating copyright are you?

Bing Maps allows the OpenStreetMap community to trace from aerial_imagery https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Aerial_imagery Google doesn't. How much a tool helps somebody to draw the actual roads varies by editor software used, some have plugins. Using AI in bulk isn't allowed afaik.

If you obtain the satellite images directly from Google Maps, you can still have problems because you might not have permission to use the data. That's not copyright though.

> you might not have permission to use the data

Isn't it fair use, like training data?

OpenStreetMap commmunity, for variety of reasons, avoids questionable or very novel approaches to intellectual property.

I guess that some may be calling it overdoing in direction opposite than Internet Archive did.

It is at least partially caused by fact that OpenStreetMap Foundation budget is laughably small.

Another reason might be that modifications of the map are entangled and can be hard to revert in case of a dispute. It's much easier for the Internet Archive to just drop snapshots of websites/pages (and they do so, AFAIK).

I think the issue is the ToU violation, not copyright.

Don't terms of use depend entirely on copyright to work? Without copyright ... why would you need to agree to terms of use to use the software/site/data?

And doesn't that mean that terms of use can never impose restrictions stricter than copyright?

No. ToU is a part of contract law. Basically the website is providing a service for you. In exchange for your use of that service, you agree to be bound by the terms. This implicitly creates a contract between you and the website, with the terms laid out by the ToU. This sort of implicit contract is legally controversial - normally for a contract to be valid there needs to be affirmative signatures from both parties, as well as consideration (money) exchanged. In the U.S. at least, "click-wrap" (where you must affirmatively click "I agree") and "scroll-wrap" (where you must scroll through the whole ToU before the product unlocks) ToUs are generally considered enforceable, but "sign-in wrap" (where creating an account binds you) and "browse-wrap" (where there's a ToU link) are very dubiously enforceable. But we're talking about Google here, and they make you click through the ToU and say you agree whenever you unbox a new Android device or create a Google account, and then have it apply to all usage of Google services.

Enforcement can be quite challenging because typically if you provide a service over the Internet you don't have any idea who is using it beyond their IP address and any registration data they provide, but this also means that when companies do have a known violator and can show significant monetary damages, their legal departments come down like a ton of bricks.

Violating a ToU is legal, but the corporation might ban you in return because that's legal too. All you give up is your ostensible right not to be banned.

It's a civil offense, but that's different from it being legal. It just means that it's up to the company itself to sue you to collect any damages, and government enforcement bodies aren't going to touch it.

The issue most ToU violations have with enforcement is that it's hard to show damages. If you just accessed their service with a fake name or downloaded some data for personal use, you haven't really harmed the company. So what are they gonna do, spend $10M to sue you for $0? So they just handle it internally by banning your account and discontinuing your use of the service.

But if, say, you did a DDoS attack that caused an outage costing them $100M, or you did large-scale scraping to set up a competitor that puts them out of business, and they can identify you, they absolutely will come after you in court for that money. The economics is different: now the damages they show is much more than the cost of litigating the case.

Google Maps has commercial licenses to some of their data. Reusing that data without your own license can cause problems you might not like. This mostly applies in cases where it's provable that the data you used would've required a license that you do not have.

Facts cannot be copyrighted.

When you've got the lawyer budget of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic, you can twist and bend copyright and licences to take what you want with little consequence.

OSM doesn't have the resources to fight Google or similar if they are threatened, so it's better to just avoid using data you don't have the right license for.

I would worry about trap streets. A collection of facts isn't copyrightable, and arguably the network of existing streets shown in satellite photos falls into that category. But if I were the photo licensor, I'd be tempted to Photoshop in a few fictional features that could be protected as "creative expression," or some such BS.

Trap steets (fake data with no creative expression) are not copyrightable un USA, but specific art for drawing maps is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

This is what I do now, got jack of Google throwing my contributions back in my face.

They also only email if your contribution is successful. If it's declined you'll only know by looking inside Google Maps.

Contributing to an open dataset also feels really good.

Between the streetcomplete and everydoor apps, it is very very easy to do almost any OSM map editing on a mobile. Osmand (the offline map & nav app) is also useful for some edits when I don't want to leave that app.

Oh, for the simpler days when not everything required an app.

You would enjoy the Always Sunny episode 'mental health day'

Or you can use https://mapcomplete.org/charging_stations.html to add charging stations as well; data goes to OpenStreetMap too. Disclaimer: I make this

I think "very straightforward" is vastly overselling how easy editing OSM is.

It feels like editing a database, without any affordances for easily making common updates.

If the hours of a store are wrong on Google Maps, I just upload a photo of their store, and it'll be corrected quickly.

On OSM, well, most things are out of date. There's no simple 'update this business' flow, just a database editor. And a map that feels like I could break anything by clicking in the wrong spot.

OSM is a cool project, but it isn't straightforward. And unlike Google and Apple maps, most of the businesses in my area are years out of date, so I can't effectively use it to find information either, so I just don't have any reason to interact with it. Plus no aerial/satellite/streetview imagery, which I understand is probably infeasible, but ultimately it just means OSM is a niche product that won't replace Google.

So yeah, I'm propping up Google, but I get way more benefit out of it than having an open data set used to power Amazon's delivery driver routes or whatever.

skill issue.

there's at least three user friendly and better than google maps UX clients.

but i guess they didn't bundle with your pixel nor have all the darkpatterns you got used to.

What are they?

Everydoor, Streetcomplete, and a secret third option

did you forget their own editor which is awesome and have overlay with fresh satelite donated by Microsoft?

I daily drive CoMaps, and its UI for adding common things like businesses is excellent, just tap a point, tap "add place to OpenStreetMap", choose what you want to add (e.g. restraunt, parking, store, etc.) and fill in the relevant details. It's not a full database editor, it's got just what you need to quickly add things to the map.

I'm not sure what you mean...

In OrganicMaps/CoMaps I click "edit place" > "Business hours" and get a nice vidual editor with checkboxes for each day it's open and boxes to put in times.

Same in OsmAnd, but editor looks a bit different.

Cartes.app has the "imrpove this place" screen where opening hours is one of the options, but it takes a few more clicks.

Openstreemap.org's web editor also does open hours quite well, but it does have a much complex submission process (it also asks for an edit message and edit tags).

Cartes.app has sattelite imagery as a "premium" option if you donate because they probably have to pay for it. OsmAnd also does, but I don't know if it's free because I paid for it years ago.

The real issue is local business know about google maps and are often happy to update schedules themselves. The effort for them to know/care about OSM is too high and the payoff low (most clients are on google maps).

I feel like I addressed this in my comment. On a laptop, someone who went through what OP went through would surely be able to click "Edit" at the top of https://www.openstreetmap.org, and add a SuperCharger. If they make a mistake, it is likely to get corrected, rather than rejected.

When it comes to fixing opening hours, https://streetcomplete.app does really make that about as straightforward as can be.

Edit: ah, I just noticed I forgot to prepend the * to my remark in parentheses. I did mean to emphasise that generic edits are only straightforward on a laptop, and only guided edits are straightforward using StreetComplete.

> It feels like editing a database, without any affordances for easily making common updates.

have you tried StreetComplete or EveryDoor?

Or at least GoMap!! or MaComplete ?

I started contributing a couple of months ago, and I am amazed by the fact that there's no vandalizing going on near where I live.

There are few contributions around there, mostly automated imports from like 2012.

Another thing they apparently do is let business owners (e.g. hotels) remove negative reviews because they're "defamatory".

I had a very factual 3-star review on a hotel that was supposedly very quiet, but was super noisy and the AC was not working. And there was literally nobody at the reception at the time of check-out and nobody picked up the phone either. All in all, nothing serious, but worth a review. Purely factual stuff, nothing bad-mouthed, just my experience and three stars.

A few months later the review was removed because it was "defamatory". I was able to get it reinstated by sending them proof of payment to the hotel and proof that I was there. A few months later, it was removed again! That same dance was repeated six times..... What a weird system.

I'm surprised you knew it was removed. All my negative reviews appear visible to me when logged in and disappear when logged out.

Only sure fire way I've found is to leave a two star review with no body. One star without a body is also shadowbanned for me.

Yeah they sent an official looking mail saying that someone took action against my review and that it was therefore removed.

Yet another example of how the incentives work when the platform makes its money with ad revenue. The hotel pays Google for ads and gets favorable search results. If Google then hosts a negative review, the hotel might be less inclined to advertise there. So, only positive reviews get published.

The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all, so his honest review is only worth something if it makes the advertisers happy.

> The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all,

In theory, good reviews drive traffic to Google because people come to trust it as a dependable source of important information. In reality, Google is big enough that they don't have to care. They figure that people will keep using Google no matter how many times Google lies to you. Seems like they're right because their AI overviews lie constantly. https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...

This depends on local defamation laws. It's an issue with all online reviews in countries like Germany where the onus is on Google to establish a review isn't defamatory.

MBAs, consultants and accountants have taken control of the company. All are in it to move up and cash out. They will optimize for profit and not much else. Loosing (or even defending) a defamation case is expensive. Spiking your review is free.

This is not the old Google run by engineers. Stop expecting that and you will experience less frustration.

Not just Google but many others. A big travel tech company in Asia removed my review of a shack that I once stayed in, since it mentioned things that the business felt were negative.

After all, there are many customers like you and me. If we’re gone, someone else can fill the gap. Not saying I condone it. I dislike it. But I understand.

I've found that if you attach any pictures at all: rejected.

So what I've taken to doing is adding the business without photos (almost always accepted), and then trying to attach the photos later after that goes live (mostly works). But I agree, their process is completely broken, and I doubt they have any incentive to fix it.

Question here then, is when will we see a competitor enter the market who both cares about getting it right and is actually able to compete with google maps

Apple Maps maybe?

Apple Maps is much better in my experience. I've never had an update rejected.

I've sent in corrections to Apple Maps in Portugal (shopping mall is 1km away from the location on Apple Maps) and Canada (speed camera does not exist). Both were taken care of within a couple of days.

It took them two years to update my address.

but then again Apple Maps seems (certainly here in London) to be absolutely full of geofraud entries and out of date slop, such as small businesses with linked websites that have been shuttered for years, and strange businesses located in the middle of playing fields, parks and lakes.

At least in my personal experience, Apple Maps is much worse at up to date business information than Google is

But when I've submitted updates to road changes a couple of times, they did go through

Apple Maps has Apple Ads and Apple Ads are awful.

Are they Apple Maps Bad?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E

They are absolutely awful and won't accept even a correction of opening hours - when you are the owner of the business and registered as such with Apple.

I just changed the hours on a business nearby, took ~3 days. Your experience is not universal, but definitely frustrating.

Having seen the abuse vectors that get thrown at this and similar products, I suspect it is less about whether they care and more about finding a suitable threshold for some arbitrary features, or moments of demand exceeding the available moderators. The repetitive 6 minutes make me suspect there are reports timing out in the moderator queue and the automod doesn't like images or something.

Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.

I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.

Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).

This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, with the dedicated ecosystems to gaming them that they develop, without this hiding. They can't afford humans to review in a minute or two what scammers can generate in fractions of a second, not even at their scale.

Now, I'm enough of a fan of decentralization and the destruction of these massive sites with way too much control to say that I'm perfectly comfortable saying that they should be mandated to handle these things more sensibly and with more humans. That such a plan would have the side effect of breaking them up into vastly, vastly smaller pieces, causing an technological Cambrian explosion of various sites and diversity resulting in the parasites no longer being able to focus all their firepower on a very small set of targets, is for me a bonus, if not the main goal. However, I, and anyone who agrees with me on this, is rather clearly in the minority.

In the meantime, if we're going to have things the size of Google or Facebook, there simply is no solution where we all get human review whenever we ask for it, because instantly every spammer and abuser will ask for the human review. There just isn't a solution. It looks like there is an obvious solution when you consider "how will Google review this one application" but that's not the landscape Google faces. They have to solve the problem of how to deal with the entire landscape of requests they face at once.

simple, pay 1 dollar human review, if not scammer google refund, else google keep and pay for review

This gets rid of the scams but makes all surviving reviews unreliable since they'd all be pay-to-play. It'd be better to just remove reviews altogether at that point.

Which doesn't seem like such a bad idea now that I've said it out loud.

> This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, with the dedicated ecosystems to gaming them that they develop, without this hiding. They can't afford humans to review in a minute or two what scammers can generate in fractions of a second, not even at their scale.

"Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported $112.1 billion in profit for the three months ending in June."

Ah yes, they definitely can't afford it.

I genuinely cannot grasp how someone who is capable of 1. finding hackernews 2. creating an account 3. writing a coherent English comment, can come to such an absurdly wrong understanding.

Scammers generating things in fractions of a second is an incredibly well understood problem that affects every single surface of the earth that has a "submit" button. Even completely anonymous services have largely managed to solve this. Google Maps requires a verified account, meaning it's entirely solvable. It's a non-issue.

Give me $112.1 billion every 3 months and I'll solve it for you, no worries.

A competitor would be sabotaged by both Apple and Google, the masters of the only two mobile platforms we are allowed, and who collude.

It isn't about making a better product at this point. It is about cracking into the mindshare that makes people reach for software like google maps reflexively in the first place. That is far harder than the technological challenge. Almost impossible in the current era, arguably, with all the astroturfing.

Before Google maps, map services used to be super expensive. You can't compete with free beer. You would need to disrupt Googles main business first in order to even out the playing field.

Why would they fix it when you guys find workarounds to get it done anyway?

I bet they'd care if their data started going stale because nobody bothered to update it.

Because most people would stop on the first blockage.

Had similar experience trying to add a restaurant to Google Maps, our own even. First time, rejected because didn't exist, it did. Second time, they say they sent a letter, and they see that someone received it, no one did. We wait a month, they say they sent another letter, we wait another month. Nothing, and now they stopped replying too. Wait another month, suddenly the restauarant magically exists on Google Maps, with the wrong images, wrong address, wrong open times, but the pin is the right place at least, so I guess that's cool. Took another month or two to force through all the corrections too.

This was made 2-3 years ago, probably worse today. Absolutely horrific experience, and they have zero motivation to fix it, because people like us still want to be on Google Maps, especially if you're not in a super good location, so people can actually find you.

Another path may be to add the business to OpenStreetMap first; I get the impression that Google will scrape changes to OSM and add them to it's dataset. (I've seen several small changes I've made only to OSM get propagated to GMaps a few weeks later. Possibly it's a coincidence, but when the features are exactly the same shape as the ones I drew in OSM, I get suspicious.)

I've stopped believing in the accuracy of Google maps after my experience at my last apartment. The ground floor of my building was a deli with an address like 123 4th Ave, and the entrance to the deli was basically facing the corner itself rather than either side of the cross street, and my apartment's address (using the placeholder above as a reference) was 123 4th Ave Apt. 2R. All of the apartments had a separate entrance than the deli that was further down the block past the deli on 4th Ave. The problem was that the cross street (let's call it 5th Street) also had an building with the same number two doors down, and for whatever reason, Google Maps put the address marker for the entirety of 123 4th Ave on 5th Street, and even more annoyingly, they showed the way of getting to my apartment as going into the deli's entrance first, which made no sense because there is absolutely no way to get to the apartments from inside the deli without either going outside or I guess teleporting through the ceiling. When trying to get something delivered to my apartment, the delivery people would often look at Google Maps, see the marker on 5th Street, look for the 123 marker, and then go and ring the bell for 123 5th Street instead of actually going onto 4th Ave and ringing our bell. I tried to contact Google Maps to get this addressed (pun intended), but I was told that they did not have a way to have separate entrances for different parts of the same address, and they told me to get a new separate address from the city. I responded that the city of New York would probably not issue a new address for a building I didn't own and that they could solve the problem by just moving the pin over to the 4th Ave side of the corner instead of the 5th Street side since the entrance pointed out diagonally and no one would have trouble finding it still if they did that. I never got a response, and all of my attempts to submit a correction directly got ignored.

When I lived in Jersey City, I committed the crime of living at a 1/2 address.

Literally nothing could get delivered to me if they used a Google Maps address bar. My address just didn't exist at all to that search bar. It could be found on maps, just not on that little search bar widget.

I ended up just putting my neighbors address and either intercepting delivery drivers or putting in the notes that I was at the half address next door.

Moral of the story: check your potential address BEFORE you move in

It's pretty messed up that the only way to "solve" this problem is by treating addresses that Google mishandles as uninhabitable, but I'd be lying if I didn't tell my wife I was concerned about living on a corner again when we were looking for houses to buy after that (luckily, the one we liked most and had our offer accepted for wasn't on a corner, and our plan is to never move again!)

It really radicalized me on the "Programmers don't understand [x]" series of articles.

A lot of problems would just be solved by trust-but-verify information. If a user wants to put non-sense in a text box, that should be a 'them problem' but a service that presumes all email address end in .com or that a user doesn't know their own address is worse. With that said, I understand why services do it because the Venn diagram of "will type non-sense into a field then wonder why it didn't work" and "will email into support and be the reason someone drinks" is largely a circle.

That’s odd. In my neighborhood probably 50% of houses have a 1/2 address in the back.

We have had solicitors walk through our side yard convinced they are going to the 1/2 address (which we don’t have).

Maps seems to show them all correctly.

Friend owns a construction company. Been at same address for seven years. Suddenly their Google Business Page not working right. Google says to delete it and reverify, only solution to try.

Four times my friend had to take a video: you have to start by standing on the street on the nearest intersection, film all the street signs around you to prove your location, then he had to walk down the street, show the gate with the business name on it, the vehicles with the business name on them, open the front door with the business name on it, give them a tour of the working office and show them invoices and bank statements laid out on the desk with their logo etc on it. Three times they came back and said it wasn't enough to verify.

At the same time you can go on swapd and buy GBP verification for $500 and have it verified in an hour by someone who fakes the entire thing.

You can bet those videos have been fed into their training.

I'm surprised you tried so many times to do Google's job for them.

And it's still 100x easier than trying to add your own business or set up a Google Business Profile. Shoot a video from outside showing the buildings around you, show the address and permanent signage on the building (they don't always accept door signs), unlock the door to show that you own the space, then show the interior of the space with things like signage, letterhead, business cards, etc. Then hope that the video was 'good enough' to get a listing.

And heaven help you if you choose to get an office on an upper floor where an elevator ride is required, or you get a space in a building that also has/had a co-working space in it.

Yeah, a while back Google Maps sent out a cheerful "here's all you've contributed" email and i clicked through and found my complete history. It was a graveyard of rejected edits for things like closed streets, wrong business hours, and spam listings (IDK the payoff for the spammers but there's an ongoing cluster of fake hotels and businesses near my old apartment). Seeing the total record of incorrect stuff that i had fruitlessly spent my own spare moments to fix convinced me to quit doing any free work for Google.

Endless stream of "Your review was removed - place was closed down" is a interesting reward for reviewing places. I still wonder how can a beach just stop existing.

Why would you help build Google's place-database moat for them for free?

Exactly. I hate the fact they gamified answering questions on Google maps to help keep their system updated for free.

I tried to remove a not-anoymore-existing company I had a business profile before from Google Maps. I was close to giving up, it's such a complicated process that is fully intransparent.

Kudos for you for trying 4 times.

The lesson here is: don’t do free work for corporations.

I don't even fill out surveys anymore for the most part, unless it gets me a discount or something.

Cold hard cash. If they want my input, they can pay me for my time.

If it’s a small or local business that I like patronizing then I might do something small for them out of generosity and a desire to see them succeed in place of some large chain or corpo.

If we're sharing problems contributing to google maps: I tried submitting a correction to google maps for the first time a few months back. A cafe was listed in the wrong location by about 100m. Very confusingly putting it on the other side of the station it's in front of in a different building.

I submitted the correct location and it said the change required manual review. Then a few days later I got an email that the change has been accepted. But opening google maps it was still in the same wrong location, and it's still wrong now.

I'm just sad they never sent me the Google Maps socks :-(

Meanwhile random griefer types work the Google system just fine. For whatever reason some randos altering business hours and posting mass quantities of weird maps reviews, closed updates stay up.

Meanwhile on YouTube when I’m not getting questionable medical drugs and gadgets advertised at me on YouTube… I’ll also get what seems like just porn.

I got one that I’m pretty sure was heavily hinting at “find under age girls”… I shit you not. The pic was disturbing.

My YouTube history, cats and coding music…. I don’t get it.

CGNAT'ed IP address? I get occasional CloudFlare blocks at home from some hobby-related websites I visit maybe once a week, and I know that no one else in my house is doing anything to hit rate limits.

The same thing happened when we tried to set up my brother’s car rental business on Google Maps. We gave them the website, the domain, the business number, and even the business address, but somehow, it managed to show an already-defunct business from somewhere else. Even after we complained, it didn’t fix the problem.

Same for business reviews. I’ve given up because mine are always rejected. No reason given, no appeal possible. It’s almost as if I was shadowbanned. So I don’t leave reviews anymore and wonder how many reviews are black holed. Or even how useful the reviews are because the fake reviews are rampant.

Did you add a website like https://www.tesla.com/findus?location=daegususeongsupercharg...? It's hard to reject an edit if you have confirmation from the owner.

Why are you doing work for them for free - and at that level of annoyance no less?

I have had zero luck trying to get gMaps updated to remove an imaginary address they added for my garage. I might as well just put up extra address numbers and another mailbox.

??? must have a better social credit score than 1970-01-01

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