Places on Google Maps. Can They Still Be Trusted? | Hacker News Reader

Places on Google Maps. Can They Still Be Trusted?

maphappenings.com

44 pointsthex1021 comments

> The French had invented a new acronym: GAFA. GAFA stood for “Google Apple Facebook Amazon” and if you were a member of this group you weren’t to be trusted.

Author seems to characterize this as an unreasonable stance to have, but I personally feel like not trusting <Insert Megacorp of choice> is a pretty good default even if it's not necessary the best for all situations.

Curious. For a few years I'd have looked to Google Maps / Google Local as one of the great services Google provides (along with gmail, Chat, Android, Chrome and ChromeOS development...) as an argument for how ad-supported Google is a substantial net benefit to society and against any antitrust or punitive government action. Call the legitimacy of the maps data into question and another pillar of the empire begins to crumble - not directly from any misdeed of Google, just a naive (or not..) reliance on algorithms and crowd-sourcing and inability to deal with the flood deliberate/malicious gaming of their systems by third parties.

A minor tragedy of the past 15 years of social networking is it feels like we're reaching the end of that era and, despite every opportunity for better or worse (e.g. Facebook's real name policy), we've emerged with no useful reputation system or web of trust to stem the tide of spam and SEO garbage.

Some other examples of this kind of thing:

There's a Moorish sovereign citizen group that has a name that is confusingly similar to the US federal government. Their office is labeled a "government office" on Google maps. Every time Google sends me some email telling me about the thousands of people who have been helped by some edit I made years ago, it spurs me to try to correct this location. It's always "not accepted" and it keeps on showing up as a government building. I have no idea what to do at this point, but it seems dangerous to have Google steering people towards a fake government building.

There was also a Kmart that burned down a few years back. Apparently there was a Sears appliance repair service based out of the place. Despite Google having updated aerial and street view imagery showing a fenced, empty lot covered in grass, they never accepted my business no longer exists at this location edits.

The edits are more likely to be accepted if you provide an on-the-ground photograph (presumably with EXIF data). I've gotten places updated by submitting photos of signage, posted hours, etc.

That makes me want to submit photos of a smoldering crater with modified EXIF data, as proof "the business at this location has been shut down"...

I don't even see a way to submit an explanation for my edits, let alone a photograph. Mobile only?

No they can't be trusted. There are "Google Maps Placement Consultants" who basically do SEO for Google Maps. How do I know this? I got an attempt by one of them to pitch me his services on linkedIn just this morning.

  I think it is a text book example of the main difference in DNA between Google and Apple:
      Google is all about crowdsourcing.
      Apple is all about curation.

What's in their DNA is being corporate entities answerable to shareholders. Anything else is their culture, which, unfortunately, is too amenable to change. Oh, and in this analogy, their blood is money.

> “unfortunately”

There only exists few companies with the financial might and margins relative to Opex like Apple and Google, and even rare a company that is controlled by a major shareholder (Meditations on Moloch comes to mind). I don’t see why or how Apple or Google would change their approach to business given the difficulty of doing so coordination wise and the opportunity cost of doing so. I can only see a company doing so if they had an assertive leader at the helm who is ready to pick up the low-hanging fruits of whatever upcoming technology is gonna make the shareholders the most money.

I've only added a business to Google once, and it was a restaurant I worked at. We received a physical letter, with a stamp and all from google with a verification code we had to enter in order to add our business.

From the article:

  I think it is a text book example of the main difference in DNA between Google and Apple:

    Google is all about crowdsourcing.
    Apple is all about curation.

But how does Apple scale discovering new places without crowdsourcing? Relying on business owners is not enough to have decent coverage.

Apple now allows regular users to add new places to maps but it looks like they have a review process. I added a park and they didn’t accept my report until I added photos of the park sign board.

Yeah I don’t buy the premise of the article. Both google and apple accept crowd-sourced places after a review. Google Maps is the big player so it gets more spam attacks, but I don’t think the processes for crowdsourced places are very different between the two.

Description of how to add a place to apple here: https://www.reddit.com/r/applemaps/comments/gruew8/comment/f...

There are 3rd party data providers like Yext that can syndicate the data to different location services customers. Businesses can create and update in Yext and then data gets updated by the location services. If a location services company sources data from multiple independent locations providers such as Yext, Four Square, Yelp, web scraping it can get a profile that a place exists.

My favorite is when google "helpfully" sets up a different phone number for a restaurant than their actual phone number for some reason. Super sketchy

You mean the GrubHub "fake" telephone thing or something else?

I believe it's probably a similar situation. Search for a restaurant in google, and click on the "Phone number" portion of the infobox. It often shows two phone numbers; The actual phone number of the restaurant, and a "Google number" that google puts as the primary phone number. I have no reason to believe these businesses did this on purpose, because they give out their actual phone number on menus and advertising. Why is google putting themselves in the middle of this transaction? How is that not a straight up crime?

I'm not sure about the places per se, but I've learned to do my own homework on hours and closing times.

Apple Maps is very incomplete and missing a lot of places.

Google Maps has lots of fictitious locations and routes.

Apple Maps doesn't have biking directions in most places.

Google Maps tells you to bike down the pedestrian line. Or cross through a street with no crossing. Or turn left onto a tunnel that's crossing perpendicular 2m under you (e.g. penetrate through 2 metres of solid ground). I've even had instructions to just bike onto the highway *in the wrong direction* for a few hundred metres.

Google Maps is okay for finding places that don't show u anywhere else, but dangerous for directions and routing.

Organic Maps is surprisingly good with biking directions, but is missing a lot of venues and public transit.

Interestingly, adding my own business locations to Google Maps here in Germany is quite a cumbersome process. They send postcards with one time passwords in order to initially verify that I am somewhat owning that places.

Wow, this guy is BRAVE. I'm sure a ToS got violated and google could lock him out. I suppose the fact he works at Apple shields him ... for now.

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