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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..
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
With google maps, a phone number change might not be apparently a bad edit until you call it, and even then if it was setup with the sole purpose of misrepresenting a business, then it will be difficult to verify.
Even worse, if the information is a website to reserve a room at a hotel, the only people who will know that the link that takes you to Booking.com or some other reseller is bogus is the hotel itself. Did I just get sent to booking.com when I clicked on "reserve a room" because this hotel wants me to go through booking.com, or did some nefarious bad guy point me to his website so he can scam a commission?