Google Maps is still overrun with scammers pretending to be local businesses, and Google's profiting from them

I have to agree. Google is a company racing to a trillion dollar valuation, and it does not need to have slave labor i.e. internet point paychecks.

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I had this happen when I tried to find a storage center. You click on a pinned business in Town X. You call them up and they say “Oh, yeah, we’re actually 15 miles away in Town Y.”

What’s interesting is that only larger chains do this. So they’ll have pins in every single town, directing you to their nearest location. A local, singly-owned business wont do this; he just has one pin. What’s going to be a mess is when the local businesses all play catch-up and each put 20 pins in the 20 surrounding towns. So every town will become a bulletin board of imaginary storefronts (which it’s close to being anyway).

It’s hard to fault the businesses from taking advantage of this marketing technique. This is to Google to vet all this local data-- but it seems a rather daunting task. Even if you rely on crowdsourcing and AI heuristics to filter and act on the feedback: how do you prevent businesses from “attacking” each other by downvoting each other’s pins? Somehow, humans are going to have to be involved and it’s going to be expensive.

My neighborhood has an active Facebook group which is useful for this kind of thing, and is about 75% of why I’m still on Facebook.

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Here in Seattle we have the excellent Home Owners Club. Maybe they have something like it where you live.

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