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How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Wired about the one big problem that comes with crowdsourced data: enough eyeballs may make all bugs shallow, but may not fare as well against malice and greed: Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website. In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site ... Small businesses are the usual targets. ....These attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowdsourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google's Mapmaker or Google Places for Business. ... In February, an SEO consultant-turned-whistleblower named Bryan Seely demonstrated the risk dramatically when he set up doppelganger Google Maps listings for the offices of the FBI and Secret Service..
GOOOOOOGLE!
Gmail is very effective at filtering spam out of e-mail. Maybe Google should use the same technology to filter spam business listings out of Google Maps.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
and less coverage for inaccuracies
again and again people fail to understand that they are the ones giving this power to a single company. :)
who controls the map ?
or, why the world needs openstreetmap
http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/01/04/why-the-world-needs-openstreetmap/
of course, no dataset is immune from vandalism/poisoning... but an open one is both available for auditing/monitoring, and also improvable by many more, not just business owners.
Rich
If a sufficiently large population of interested people can be induced to correct the map it shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. Wikipedia suffers and reverts many thousands of bits of misinformation daily. Not to say it's perfect but it's good enough.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
At this point, I would happily pay Google to enforce my listing information. I have spent many man-weeks worth of time over the last 5 years trying to keep my listings from being hijacked.
Problem reports to Google take months to be answered, if ever. If I make changes to my listings to keep them "fresh" it takes dozens of weeks for those changes to be approved. It seems like ANY differing data that Google scrapes from the web is prioritized over my painstakingly maintained listings.
Oh, and about 95% of my customers use Google Maps instead of the phone book. This is a huge deal to me.
It's one of their most visible, most used products, and Google appears to give not half-a-shit about the businesses out there that they screw over by prioritizing inaccurate information over the real deal. It's weird.
Something similar happened to me recently. Google Maps led me to a business that was no longer there (if it ever was). A week or so later, I asked it about a Wells Fargo branch. It sent me to one about a mile away. Later on, I realized there was one just a block down the street from where I made the inquiry. Doh!
The editors... really enjoy .... not doing fucking shit ....
Tragedy of the commons
Yesterday, when I read this article, I checked out a location which I'm not willing to share here. On it was exactly this type of 'theft' of location, and street-view manipulation as explained in this article. In fact I had noticed the hack before in this location, but not realized it as such.
Yesterday, when I looked and saw the display via the new GMAPs interface, I was amazed at the *quality* of the hack. A dirty, mouse-infested hotel down the street 'occupied' a very desirable corner location and cafe. Using street-view, it appeared as if the cafe was the hotel's bar. Plus they had purchased an ad to book the hotel when you clicked the PIN, and the result looked IMHO better than a professional web-page for such a purpose (because of the new GMAPs interface and presentation). The final result was a stuning, quality, hack I thought, and everyone I showed it to agreed. But I give more credit to dumb luck plus the new GMAPs interface then cleverness by the thieving hotel owner.
I used the 'suggest an edit' tool to report the manipulation to Google, and also input new, accurate information for the cafe on the corner, and other neighborhood features.
Weird thing is, today when I look via various machines inthe office, I see various displays. Some showing the old GMAPs interface, some new. Some with the dirty hotel competely removed from the map, and the cafe added. Like DNS, it seems it takes a while for GMAPs to get updated, and probably the more people that offer input the better.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
They give some examples of businesses that claim to be having problems because of incorrect data Google Maps. But then one of those examples just has abysmal reviews in general (which, to their credit, they note in the article).
It's not even "obscure" or "hidden" or really protected in any way at all. You go to google maps, you say "report an error" and you fill whatever the fuck you want in. You drag the company marker out to the middle of the lake.
This isn't even a webservice that gives you someone else's phone information if you punch in your number+1, it's working exactly as intended. "Hacking" indeed.
You assume every small business owner is technology savvy enough to monitor Google Maps, along with every similar web service for such malicious acts, on a regular basis. Seriously, you must be able to see you will always have a given percentage of businesses that fail to do such a task, and do it well.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Yelp basically extorts businesses by hiding favorable reviews unless the business pays up.
I'm surprised businesses don't monitor the Google maps listing. I tried calling a chain restaurant one time and it went to the fax number. Kind of a big deal. I use Google maps over the yellow pages or any other means of looking up a number.
Maybe there is Google technology that Slashdot could use to prevent duplicate stories from appearing within days of each other.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This was discussed already and the general conclusion was the restaurant had very poor service. Poor service will kill a reputation faster than anything else. I remember going to a restaurant that was short staffed. They were trying to accommodate people, and were nice about it. But after waiting 30 minutes for bread, we left. You can always expect bad reviews based on food, you can't please everyone.
Plus I don't think Google information can kill a place in just a few weeks. People have phones and call ahead to confirm hours, seating availability, location and even directions. I know I always call. It's lazy people who just browse Google and believe everything they see without confirmation.
Website: http://www.serbiancrown.com/
Yelp Reviews: http://www.yelp.com/biz/serbian-crown-restaurant-great-falls
Trip Advisor reviews: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g57783-d497915-Reviews-The_Serbian_Crown_Restaurant-Great_Falls_Fairfax_County_Virginia.html
Google Maps entry: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Serbian+Crown+Restaurant/@38.97349,-77.295876,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89b6360d0a8fbba5:0x79a2bbe49b2f3a1e
Most of the reviews complain about very poor service. Waiters not checking up on the tables, one guest said they had to wander around to find a water pitcher and refill it themselves. People have waited 30+ minutes to receive the menu and bread. One guest claimed they were there for over 3 hours in total waiting for various courses. Guests would arrive only to find there was not host/hostess at the podium to seat them. Guests complained about rude staff both in person and over the phone. And these aren't recent complaints, they go back to 2010.
The only reason people use Google Maps, or other paid map services for that matter, is for convenience
If you have to look up and add every address you want to use it's not going to far as a tool, not to mention the whole problem Google Maps has now is community abuse!
I am sure their ultimate plan is to become the new yellow pages. Give basic listings for free, charge $30 a month for user controlled listings. Once yellow pages were regional, but google maps will be global. Just like google is the defacto search engine, they also want to become the defacto yellow pages.
ALL those businesses willing to pay a small fee to be listed. Probably hundreds of billions per year in fees alone, not including advertising. It will become the gotta pay it tax for a business to remain visible. Wish I would have bought some google stock a few years ago...
Luckily my business isn't one that takes walk-up traffic, but I enjoyed the extra phone calls I'd get. I've recently seen a drop in people calling, but never considered Google Maps to be why. I read this article and found that someone removed my maps listing. As a small one-man company, if this was my ONLY employment, I could have been screwed. Fortunately its a side-business and my calendar was full, regardless.
Obviously they should have been buying AdWords ads.
So if enough people listed Brin or Page's home address as something icky.. like a support group for pedo's, or a west coast branch of the Westboro Baptist Church, Google would do nothing to correct the inaccurate information? :)
A few 'User's choice" campaigns have found first hand the flaw in this type of contest in the 4chan/anon era, maybe one day Google Maps will be abused in similar fashion.
I worked at an also-ran Yelp competitor, and seeing locksmiths singled out as one of the perpetrators here is utterly unsurprising. They accounted for probably 98% of the spamming and shady activity on our site. We got to the point that we totally barred businesses from being created that contained a fuzzy match on lock (they tried 1ocksmith, l0c|smith, etc) unless they paid a vetting fee. That made them switch to spamming other random business's reviews with ads for themselves, falsely marking competitors as closed or as having invalid phone #s, giving their competitors legit-sounding negative reviews, etc. They clearly did it all by hand, which actually made it in some ways harder to combat than a more predictable script-based attack.
Don't know what makes locksmithing such an epicenter of shadiness, but I hope Google and the other players in the business listing space figure out a way to stamp out this behavior for good.
Google maps also won't change or take down a listing if it closes or moves, until a new tenant moves into the old address. Even for paying business subscribers. Very annoying
You keep using this word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Google could hire a couple of hundred more people, yes live human beings, perhaps even in the country they are tasked to curate and then, well they could review proposed changes, you know curate? Google is a de facto authority on a variety of types of information. Google makes a lot of money off of that standing. THEY NEED TO STEP UP HERE. They risk losing that standing.
Every time I see that term, I cringe. I've never heard anything 100% good from any of those guys, there's always some trickery or grey-area ethics involved.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Business search is sadly broken in many ways. Whenever I google for a service that I actually need, there are dozens upon dozens of sites at the top of the results. No doubt they're all SEO'd there. When you follow the links, what do you get? A boiler-plate script along the lines of $foo is an experienced contractor in $bar who serves the $locality area. In fact, he does nothing of the sort if he even exists.
The surveillatizing industry does a fantastic job of tracking us and shoving shit-ads at us for stuff we don't want.
And yet, when I'm searching for a service that I ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY FOR, I have to deal with all this dreck.
I figure it must be click-bait, since I've clicked on it because it's misleading. I have a couple ad-blocking methods running concurrently, so I almost never see 3rd party ads there; but I can't imagine what other motive there would be to provide absolutely useless boilerplate like that.
BTW, I guess you could extend this out even further to say that many things other than searching for a business are broken by click-baiters.
Take any question, really. "Who won the 1950 World Series". And although I haven't tested this yet, I'm willing to wager somebody has a site out there that will tell you something like, "The 1950 World Series is available on eBay. Click here to learn more about 1950 World Series products, etc..."
The AI that does this shit is usually pretty smart, but sometimes you get gems like, "The best cleaning products for your World Series".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I work for a large-ish online listing company, and we are getting killed by spammers as well who both create massive numbers of listings AND then spam the review section with glowing reviews. Locksmiths are the worst, plumbers are pretty bad too (along with carpet cleaners, garage door openers, etc.). Sadly the fact that there is so much money to be made at this means there will always be an incentive for someone to beat you. The biggest problem though is that you want user data, just good data, so you still have to allow end users to claim and edit listings, and post reviews. Any thing you do to slow down spammers will slow down legit users as well. The key is to find the right balance...
See my 2010 paper "'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars." As I wrote back then, "The two phases of spamming Google Places are the insertion of fake business locations and the creation of fake reviews. Both are embarrassingly easy." That hasn't changed.
Google doesn't fix this 4-year-old problem because Google makes money from bad search results. If search results take you directly to the business selling whatever it is you want, Google makes no money. If you're detoured through some Demand Media content farm, Google makes ad revenue. If you get fed up with being sent to ad-choked sites and click on a Google ad, Google makes money. Organic search that sucks is a fundamental part of Google's business model.
Technically, it's straightforward to fix this. Business data has to be checked against sources businesses can't easily manipulate, such as business credit rating companies. A business that reports fake store locations to Dun & Bradstreet or Experian will soon have a very low credit rating.
Bing or Yahoo could beat Google at search quality. They have the same spam problem, but it doesn't make them money. That's because Google has most of the third-party advertising market. Web spam on Bing drives traffic mostly to sites with Google ads, not Bing ads.
The real search engines are Google, Bing, Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Everybody else, including Yahoo, is a reseller. Yandex has been doing some interesting stuff lately with linkless search ranking, and Baidu just opened a Silicon Valley office.
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer announced last January that Yahoo was getting back into search. (They've been reselling Bing since 2009.) That appears to have been a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft. There's no indication of Yahoo actually building a search engine. No relevant job ads, no data center buildout, no increased crawling by Yahoo bots, no high-profile hires, no buzz in Silicon Valley.
Bing ought to be doing better than it is, but they're reported to have management problems. Every year, there's new top management at Bing, and it doesn't help.
"A week or so later, I asked it about a Wells Fargo branch. It sent me to one about a mile away"
This is why you look on Wells Fargo's website for their location addresses and then put the closest one's street address into google's map for navigation.
Well, when your business model is to use donated, individual efforts to build a database —a database that you then use to make money via advertising with no contributor compensation. . .
Well, don't be surprised when some "hired gun" pretends to be one of us altruistic citizens contributing to your database. And they make stuff up.
SEO guys. Google Map spammers. The list goes on forever.
These "crowd-sourced" businesses, making money off of the altruism of anonymous individuals, have it coming to them. There is no free ride.
Make a google account. Claim the business. go through the verification process.
https://support.google.com/pla...
And then after that they only take updates from you unless someone else can succeed at the verification process which should be a bit hard without pilfering your mail.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Google's location-address information is not always accurate. I have put many addresses in only to find the actual business and/or home a few blocks away.
Try searching for *anything* on Google search. Over half of the results are commercial, even if you're not looking for a commercial thing. Either they failed, or they are in it for the advertisements after all. If google had balls, they'd blacklist any company that pops up with a commercial result (that they didn't get paid for) for non commercial searches. I suppose it would backlash so hard they don't want to put in the effort, or they actually failed at it.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Yeah, I've had that happen to me before. I think it got worse with the new version of Maps they introduced a few months back (first on Android and then on the web).
It's slowly improving though.
look on Wells Fargo's website for their location addresses and then put the closest one's street address into google's map for navigation.
Google's location-address information is not always accurate. I have put many addresses in only to find the actual business and/or home a few blocks away.
If you carefully read, you would see that the GP is suggesting to use Google Map to navigate, not to find where the location of the business should be.