Several years ago my spouse and I took a vacation abroad and booked a tour with a local company. The guide was really shocked when I told him that I went with their company because they had negative reviews. All of the touring companies had fairly amateur web sites, but with the exception of this company, all of the Yelp reviews were glowing, 5-star, nothing-went-wrong-with-this-trip reviews. His company had fairly good reviews, with one or two one-star reviews from angry customers that cancelled at the last minute and didn't get their deposit back.
I expect a few bad reviews - nobody runs their business in such a manner that every customer is satisfied 100% of the time. If I see nothing but outstanding reviews, I'm going to assume they're all fake.
Especially key is also what the bad reviews are for. Like in your case, you identify the bad reviews are unreasonable expectations. Bad reviews with claimed reasonable cause may be worth a little more pause.
Also important is number of reviews. I'd rather have a solid 4/5 product with 100 reviews than a straight 5 star product reviewed only 3 times.
If you are running a popular place, whether you like it or not, you'll end up on Google controlled listings. Unfortunately, there's little help for a non-tech savvy business owner to fix problems with listings or fake reviews or even removal of genuine reviews. This is an area where they need to be held accountable. If you are wielding so much power, you need to handle it responsibly and error in favor of business owners rather than community. Most web companies prefer the approach of 'act now, apologize later' or maybe never to garner users.
I've had so many web services (including Facebook) create accounts using my email address without my approval (maybe because the other person used phone verification). Now if I want to claim back my email address on that web service, they put the burden on me to provide a photo ID. Using my email address is partially impersonating me because my contacts might have uploaded their address book and FB allows that willy nilly.
With Facebook, no. My guess is that if you've verified with a phone number, they make it difficult to reset by an unverified email (they favor the fake user and assume that the email was entered incorrectly). Moreover, I don't want to take over someone's account if they've been ignorant about entering the email incorrectly. They still own the data. However I do report that I didn't create this account. Services like FB blacklist the email address in that case. As a result, I can't use that email in future without giving a photo ID (never gonna happen).
Had the same problem, someone used my email to create a facebook account and now I can't get it back without going through various loops that I honestly don't care about. I just put anything that is related to facebook to be automatically deleted and my friends know I hate FB and I'm not there, so if someone 'friends' them thinking it's me, I think only 2-3 people I know wouldn't suspect it.
The above article is an example of how Google unknowingly destroyed a 40 year old business that was being run by a 74 year old man who hadn't used internet. I've personally known business owners who struggle to figure out reputation management with Google listings. There's simply no systematic way to call up Google & fix things when things go wrong. We're talking about people's sole livelihood here. If there's a doubt about a listing, instead of assuming that crowd source data is correct, Google should have a clear laid out way for businesses to call up and set things right.
If you have ever used mapmaker, and attempted to update/modify POI and roads, then you will be aware of the strange and unvalidated process of accepting and denying changes to Gmaps.
There are more than a couple bad actors that are Approved Google map moderators. I am not sure if their collective actions for denying and modifying changes are a net good or net positive. It has always seemed strange that someone from Washington state can deny a detailed and documented road/POI change in Florida.
I really enjoy editing/contributing to Gmaps, but the seemingly random/poisonous moderation process in that ecosystem is a huge turn off.
Out of curiosity, have you tried OpenStreetMap? You get the same enjoyment of editing without the "random/poisonous moderation process", plus the data you contribute is open, rather than private property.
Do you know what OpenStreetMap has done to avoid the toxic editing community? Wikipedia also has a problem with a toxic community; are they doing something different?
Not so much what OpenStreetMap has done, but simply due to the nature of the project one big difference is, that OSM maps what is on the ground. So there isn't going to be a discussion if that river is relevant or not, if there is a river you map it. Other things like opening hours here are usually also easy to verify, IF you do so. So it will be more if it belongs into the database or not, but even if it doesn't there is often no big harm if tags aren't misused.
Right now most of them are more geared toward detecting accidental errors, but it is pretty safe to say that once OSM becomes more popular there will also be tools optimized to detect vandalism.
I also feel like it's a lot easier to get in touch with the community, at least here in Germany: http://www.openstreetmap.de/community.html I actually still haven't found a simple German Wikipedia Forum where I could just discuss a page, which is something that really helps new users.
Someone started creating fake business listings on fake side-streets with the names of major intersections throughout my city about a year ago. So if you searched for directions to something like "Main and 1st" you'd get redirected to someone's backyard several miles away.
Reporting it when it first started happening led to nothing but rejections and it's only in the last month or so that some of the listings are finally being purged.
If they can't be bothered to take reports seriously when they're verifiable through authoritative sources (or heck, streetview) then it seems like a hopeless case for small businesses.
Less of a problem than described in this article, and now fixed, but rather incongruous nonetheless: a couple of years ago (as far as I could make out) Google maps editing was available in some territories and not in others.
Consequently the various colleges and attractions of Oxford, UK were labelled in Japanese (and some of them in the wrong place) even when viewed from Google UK and/or in the UK, because Japanese tourists and tourist companies could edit the maps and users in the UK couldn't edit them back.
I tried to do this for my apartment complex. I kept getting fed up when people would approve my road additions, but not subtractions - and how difficult it was to change structure shapes and roads.
In case any of you have a business w/ a physical location, yext.com sells a service that lets you manage these details (business hours, location, phone #, etc) across several different sites (Bing, Mapquest, Yahoo, etc + ~50 others), rather than handling them all individually.
(Disclaimer: my partner works there - but I don't get a commission or anything :-) Just seemed relevant to the discussion)
They can lock down the listing so that only you can edit them with their partner sites. But it wouldn't work in this case since they are not partnered with Google. We just had a presentation from them at my work a few weeks ago.
This is an example of one of the major problems of crowd-sourcing: trust.
There is no way to verify that the integrity of the submitter, who could be giving wrong information due to malice, incompetence, or as a prank. There's entirely too much trust in crowdsourcing.
It works very well for Wikipedia though, but that's because Wikipedia has much more people that care about the information and maintain it. Google Maps lacks that community feeling of providing correct information, probably because it's owned and operated by Google.
Maybe local business organizations can provide help in this, have a few people dedicate some of their time to making sure all listings are correct. Alternatively, counties / local governments could take this responsibility upon them; after all, local governments dislike seeing local businesses go out of business or get less customers because they can't be found on Google.
At the same time, Google could do better in verifying changes; cross-check them with official address books and business registries and the like.
Except Wikipedia doesn't work "very well". It works OK for most subjects, but there are some areas and points of view that are no-go areas because of the prevailing values of the major editors, and even turf wars. Mentioned not to long ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700546
The only reason it works for Wikipedia is because everything must be externally-verifiable ("citation needed" and all that). On Wikipedia, trust in the crowd is not only unnecessary, it is actively discouraged. That doesn't work for all situations, and as we can see from this story, bad things can much more easily happen in cases where external verification is not available.
I think the real problem is this google has the half baked crowd-sourcing. Where you actually have a closed system and then let some people crowd source on top of it and have different ranks and people approving. It's the same reason Wikipedia is losing editors, because people don't want to wait for some admin to approve it.
In OpenStreetMap as a community project which is know as such people are much more likely to report things (on the German website there is even a big button for that). It takes longer for a edit to be approved in google map maker than people get easy stuff fixed in OpenStreetMap in my area. If I check my notes RSS feed after 1 week then most of the errors are already fixed.
Google does not come anywhere close to this. Not to mention that only a few of them can actually approve and fix things.
And because google is closed it does not have any kind of Quality Assurance tools. In OSM you could easily check if the last edit changed the opening hours and if the new one is strange (like not open Saturday evening)
Your prediction fails to account for the fact that Wikipedia can manage the problem, and they are probably the most important information source there is while still being by far the easiest to edit. What makes you think it is impossible for OSM to do it?
(Also, a bit dishonest to call OSM irrelevant when it is the canonical data source for a number of famous application, including Apple, even if it's not directly applicable to the situation here.)
I don't think it's a major problem. This is one old guy who didn't even understand that his restaurant was listed on Google. As soon as a tech-savvy person stepped in it was cleared up in a few minutes. The damage may have already been done, but that's another story (some are saying the restaurant was already in decline).
Sure, it's unfortunate, and these kind of "crowd-sourcing casualties" are going to happen here and there, but is it really that big of a problem, relative to the value that is gained?
I've heard so many horror stories of businesses trying to remove fake reviews from competitors. Even a tech savvy can't do much if your nemesis are bent upon destroying your online reputation. A company like Google doesn't offer an easy way to alleviate that. Your best bet is that you hope to stay lucky.
online scamsters are more focused on trying to pretend they got you to click an ad and buy something, but as soon as they turn their heads towards using 'crowdsourcing' for financial gain then the value of what crowdsourcing provides becomes extremely diminished. not only is its value diminished, but it becomes a weapon to use against people you do not like or competition.
imagine running bobs pizza just paying 100$ to some russian or chinese group to put negative yelp reviews for the near tom's pizza as well as change their opening and closing hours on places like google, etc costing them 10s of thousands of dollars.
Would this type of hack fall under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? If so, it seems like an easy case to prosecute (the person committing the act has a financial profit motive, the public would like to see genuine bad actors get punished, etc). Or does the CFAA not apply because this isn't a protected resources?
Maybe it could count as "knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value".[0]
But they only bring out that kind of prosecutorial initiative and creativity, if you downloaded a bunch of academic articles after previously identifying yourself as a bit of a troublemaker (Aaron Swartz). Who cares about some old immigrant's restaurant? OK, enough cynicism for today..
You can't even rely on a business' website anymore, though. You have to actually call them on the phone and talk to a real person there, at the business. Too often even the business owner doesn't have time to update their website or get the "web guy" (read: his brother in law's son) to update the website in a timely manner.
If I were Google, Yelp, or Facebook, I'd give serious consideration to selling local businesses pre-created, theme-able web sites on a subscription basis. They already have essentially all the content such sites would need, and better designers than most small businesses would have access to.
I regularly run into local places that use their Facebook page as their de facto virtual storefront, but that format could be much better customized for individual business varieties' needs, even putting aside the limitations of living in Facebook's garden.
They already do: Facebook and Google both have a "pages" feature which is designed for exactly that. Most businesses don't seem to want their Facebook/Google page to be their official website though, perhaps they think it looks unprofessional.
It's unprofessional for any business to use a Facebook page as their website. A business that wants to appear professional has their own domain and their own presence on the web; Facebook pages are for marketing, not hosting your website. A professional presence doesn't have another company's branding all over it.
Yeah, but with Squarespace you actually have to do the work of building and updating your web site. I'm proposing Google, for example, use a mix of algorithms and design to expand that "info box" you get when you search for Willy's Pizza or Suds Laundromat into a full site, and sell it as a turnkey solution.
"Here's your (crummy, last-updated-2011) web site today, and here's the beautiful one we've already built for you, including full online reservations and take out ordering. With just a few clicks you can customize it with photos or a new menu. Pay us $NN/month and we'll immediately switch your domain to point at this shiny new site."
Squarespace could move in this direction, too, by continuing to specialize and extend its templates until a good looking, functional site takes an average of minutes. But Google has the advantage of already knowing enough about the average small business to build it a better web site in literally milliseconds.
Yelp customers don't want theme-able, if I'm browsing five restaurants closest to me to decide which ones to go to in the next 10 minutes, I want to see the type of cuisine, hours, menus, etc. in a consistent way instead of playing "find Waldo" with whatever artistic genius designed that specific theme.
Sure, but local businesses will still want control over their main web address. I don't think very many are confident enough to simply redirect you to their Yelp page.
Google runs a GYBO (Get Your Business Online) program doing that, down to domain name, in an effort to upsell things like GApps once the small business is ready, I'm not sure how popular it is.
A place where I work has irregular hours such that the common hours are noted but contact is requested to book and verify that the business is available. The specific industry is too small to be targeted with affordable online bookings systems and the business is on the smaller end of that.
No listings sites seem to anticipate that a place can have opening hours but be "booking not always required"; indeed level of booking requirement doesn't appear to feature in any local business listings pages.
This can't be that rare as another business on our short road has the same booking policy ("not always required"). I understand entirely that Google/Facebook/Yelp/etc. want to pin down strict times but an alternate string field with suggested standardised forms would seem sensible for many businesses.
Thus opening times aren't entered and the only thing you can do is contact us to enquire what our policy is. It's a shortcoming of the listings database design.
"You can't even rely on a business' website anymore, though. You have to actually call them on the phone and talk to a real person there, at the business."
Anymore? That is the traditional way of finding that kind of information. Sure, there was a brief period of time when only technically sophisticate businesses were online, but as you say, that is no longer the case.
No for sure, I wasn't disagreeing with the comment (hence the tangent disclaimer), just pointing out something that most people have a misconception about. I'm pretty sure that you can still install Flash on Android, just not in Chrome (or probably the stock browser, where it still exists); My phone has KitKat on it and I can use the Flash plugin as long as I switch to Firefox.
It would seem to me these types of hacks are very risky in light of the recent lawsuits involving bogus Yelp reviews.
Specifically, Yelp was forced by the courts to reveal the real identities behind bogus reviews, and further individuals have been held personally liable for defamation.
Though the Google Map hacks may not fall under a cause of action for defamation (thought it may), certainly I could see rather large judgments under a theory of tortious interference with business contracts/business relationships. These suits permit not just damages for economic loss, but also punitive damages.
How does the First Amendment apply to Yelp reviewers? Is Congress making laws that abridge the rights of free speech in Yelp reviews?
On a separate point, I think the percentage of customers a corrupt business owner could defraud is pretty low. Happy customers may post reviews, but defrauded customers will go after a business like angry hornets. A small number of frauds will become a disproportionate number of negative reviews.
With the comment deleted above, it is difficult to place the context of yours. However, the following is probably relevant/insightful either way:
Judge William Petty wrote that the negative reviews in question were not protected by the First Amendment because "If the reviewer was never a customer of the business, then the review is not an opinion; instead, the review is based on a false statement of fact ... And 'there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.'"
Aren't there large-scale services to whom a small business owner can pay an annual subscription fee, where the service will monitor the accuracy of their Google, Yelp, Open Street Map, Wikipedia, Yellowpages, etc. information?
The article mentions some person on a retainer who does this on a shop-by-shop basis, but it seems to me that this is something that can be automated and scaled.
What exactly is yelp telling you? I'm something of a foodie and am stunned at how inaccurate the reviews are for most restaurants. Most of the reviews seem to come from a minority "elite" users who are chronic whiners and come off as terribly immature. Its just incredible what people ding establishments for. "Fries came late, this place sucks! Zero stars!"
Some people think the issue with yelp and google reviews is trust. Its not. Its entitlement and a lack of proper criteria. The types of people who gravitate towards these reviews and become frequent reviewers are often people with poor taste and a lack of understanding of what they are reviewing. They're not crowd-sourced Robger Eberts. They're your cranky local paper's film critic who thinks 'naughty language' is the most unforgivable sin.
If anything, services like yelp have made me appreciate the art of criticism and a lot of my dining decisions are now done via professional critics with good reputations instead of the usual gang of misanthropes and weirdos who dominate yelp.
Do you have any examples of awesome restaurants that have poor ratings on Yelp? Assuming a sufficient number of reviews, Yelp ratings are at least "directionally accurate". In my experience, a place with four stars is decent and two stars is poor.
Many Asian restaurants in the Bay Area that I like are 3 or 3.5 stars, though many others with that rating are mediocre. But on the low or high end, it seems very accurate.
Yelp seems pretty useless for mid-range or focused restaurants. Think of a Mexican place that is inexpensive, but has great food that comes out in plastic baskets. Their Yelp page will be full of complaints about the plastic baskets.
There's a great ice cream place near me that gets complaints about their customer service. You're buying an ice cream cone! It takes like 3 sentences; how much service do you need? No joke, there are 2-star reviews like "Stopped by after dinner; the line was out the door and the owner seemed tired. The ice cream was delicious though."
This was the second time I really read through reviews on yelp. The first time I was reading reviews about a restaurant I love and reviewing it myself. And when I say I don't trust yelp, I meant the user base :)
> I usually don't trust yelp, but the decline is way too visible here.
So, you are told of a credible example of a restaurant being sabotaged on one user-content-based website by opponents, and then turn to another user-content-based notorious for fake reviews & astroturfing, and see an abrupt & extraordinary decline on every axis, and rather than take this as additional evidence of the sabotage campaign, you take this as evidence that the restaurant was declining simultaneously with the sabotage campaign? Interesting reasoning there.
People love to bash yelp, but it's merely a reflection of the fact that People Are Dicks
Check the reviews, there's also how many reviews and friends the person has. The lower these two numbers are, the most likely the review is fake (either pro or against)
Also check how balanced the review is. Most legitimate ones are fair, and won't go over the top either way
And of course, there's always someone that's going to complain about a sushi restaurant serving raw fish.
I always wondered about this, but now it's obvious: google doesn't make sure those business info are accurate, it might have a huge cost to verify those info, for example asking for some paperwork to check.
openstreetmap, on the other hand, seems much more trustful on this, since it's moderated a little like wikipedia is.
I guess if openstreetmap was more popular, you might start to see similar problems described in that article.
I'm sure even governments would not want to give the data of businesses opening/closing for free.
As a business owner, it's your job to make sure those listings are accurate, just as it would be you would want to make sure the yellow pages had your right phone number. There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance, and if you don't want to bother to be in charge of your online presence, you had better hire someone for the job.
> There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance, and if you don't want to bother to be in charge of your online presence, you had better hire someone for the job.
I hate to disagree with this because I sympathize strongly with the underlying sentiment, but I have to disagree anyway in this case. If you had just said that business owners who don't have an online presence could benefit from having one, I would certainly agree. But if, for whatever reason, a business owner does not have an online presence, that does not give online entities like Google an excuse to publish false factual information about them. The operating hours of a business are factual information, and if Google is going to let such information appear on its site, it has a responsibility to verify its accuracy with the actual business owner.
> There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance
I know the internet is much more popular since the last 10 years, but I don't think everyone is really up to it. There are still big opportunities to scam people who don't have the minimum of tech savyness: viruses, etc.
The internet is still a jungle with not enough laws.
There are many areas of the law which have been untouched for decades, and only starts now to create new cases because of how the internet works. Couchsurfing for example. Also scamming has never been so easy with the internet.
I'm not saying you really need laws, but regulations might improve the situation. There's nothing really illegal there, but it would be nice to see google being liable for its data if it reach a certain size of audience. In this case it's false advertising of defamation (unintentional).
Google map is a product, even if it hides behind a free thing "use with caution". Most people can get along with it, but if it starts to have a big impact on society, people will indeed become wary and learn, but not everyone will do.
I guess you can say "let the nature do its work", but that's not always how government see things, and that's not why the government exists. Strong government can do big improvements, I think. It depends, that's a balance to find.
What if the owner has no idea that his business even has an online presence? I can see that being very common amongst older business owners, especially if they have never even used Google before.
I think if the gp had said "As a business owner, it's in your best interests...", there would be less to argue about (without really changing the meaning).
I think it's likely that he had little interest in the online presence of his business, but he must also have missed opportunities to better manage it (I'm thinking of information from a chamber of commerce or similar, or just conversations with people).
I can confirm that Google actually do call businesses to verify hours and address information. My cafe has been opened for 16 months now and I've received three calls within that time frame. Two of which said they were from Google and calling to verify hours, address and web address is correct. The last one didn't introduce himself but asked for the same information.
To what extent is a weapon or a tool at fault, instead of the shooter or user? This reminds me of Google bombing (for example, the attack on Rick Santorum, a Senator whose ideas we can all disagree with).
It seems to me that there is a responsibility here for Google. Google has become in effect the only way for small businesses to get or not get exposure, and the way Google automates the process without authorization causes these fringe problems. Fringe for Google, lethal for the business owner.
I think it is in Google's best interest to improve the process through which they deal with the problems, and maybe even help prosecute those who created them. Unfortunately, I also think they see these as collateral damage in a battle to create the most automated system that works 99.99999% of the time.
On the other hand, it is a shame this biz owner had no computer expertise nor knew to take care of his online reputation and information. Just like people and Linkedin or github, businesses need to take responsibility. As in any transitions, some people will be left behind, and it seems there is not a lot we can do to avoid that.
Assuming that a competitor did this, then it is fair to assume that the person does not know how the "criminal mind" of someone who is after him works.
I just learned today that someone wearing Google Glass can record me typing my password on my iPad from a long distance, and be able to algorithmically figure out my password. Did I know that? No, and I am not even 74 years old.
Did you read the article? This isn't a case of the owner not caring; he didn't know that google maps was incorrectly reporting his hours. It took a phone call from a customer. And that's the problem - why would he ever think that people weren't coming to his restaurant because a map service messed up his hours? As is clear from this article, that was very low on his checklist of things that might be killing my business.
Yes, I did read the article, and my comment stands.
It is absolutely a case of the business owner not caring. It's completely understandable to not care about something that you don't know about. But if you do care about it, then you will learn about it.
As a business owner, you need to care and know how your customers find you. Be it Bing Maps, Google Maps, the phone book, etc. And you need to care that your information is correct in those places, and that means you need to know about them. Or have someone act on your behalf who can check them for you.
Yes, and more than that: he didn't know what Google Map is. He is 74 and can be excused for that. Fast forward ourselves into our 70+: how many new things we won't know or care about then?
I think everyone here is sympathetic to the idea that a 74 year-old shouldn't have to keep up with every new technology, but you seem to be forgetting the fact that he's running a business. Not knowing what Maps is is fine for a random consumer, but excusing a restaurant owner for not knowing about online map services is basically saying that he's no longer competent to run the restaurant.
...or knowing that he doesn't know about "that online stuff," and hiring someone who does know about it to help him manage it. It's a cost of business.
"The known, the unknown, and the underknown" - TMBG
"as we know, there are known knowns[...] there are known unknowns[...] But there are also unknown unknowns" - Donald Rumsfeld
It's easy for business-minded techies to understand the impact of "that online stuff". It's very likely that a septuagenarian restauranteur simply doesn't fathom its potential impact.
Agreed, and unfortunately for him, his competition WILL understand it. It's survival of the fittest. The fit septuagenarians are the ones who listen to their grand-kids who tell them they have to get "online."
if google is going to take it upon themselves to list a business they should be held accountable and the information should be accurate. google listed the business without his consent and it was incorrect information. i hope he wins... google listing a business that is closed on weekends could have been detrimental in this case. the business owner doesnt need to change because technology has evolved beyond his understanding, google should have never listed the business to begin with. google = giant scraper site of misinformation.
> the business owner doesnt need to change because technology has evolved beyond his understanding
I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but I disagree with that line in particular.
If you disagree, please sent your reply via the Pony Express to the Harlem Public House; I shall check with the barman therein to see if your letter arrives every other Sunday.
Note: IIRC, the pony express was a transport mechanism for the US mail service, which has the same API today. And if you do send a letter to someone C/O the Harlem Public House, said establishment still exists and is willing to hold mail, and you do check it periodically, you will very likely get the letter.
it was still serving lion, horse, kangaroo... Good riddance. Time has changed and the owner just didn't notice it. He blames it on Google while his business simply fell out of fashion.
"The Serbian Crown closed its doors after nearly 40 years in the same location."
Oh sure... blame it on Google Maps telling people you aren't open on Sat, Sun, Mon. I guess your regulars, who you've built up over 40 years, don't know when you're open unless they look at Google maps. Even the owner himself says "If you’re going there, it’s because you’ve planned to go there."
I imagine his problem could be more accurately blamed on the decor (it looks hideous on the outside and that doesn't bode well for the inside) and the low quality of food being served (unless there are lion,kangaroo and bear farms in Virginia than that meat has probably been frozen).
With that being said, Google maps is far from perfect. They really should have a way for business owners that they list to be able to update their store information, especially for small businesses. How hard would it be to implement a callback system that allowed an owner to make simple updates to hours of business or to delete false/inaccurate listings? I guess they're too busy trying to find places in their code base to replace 'if' statements with bayesian filtering.
Demonstrating causation between a bad Google Maps listing and Serbian Crown’s decline is going to be hard, though. For one thing, the restaurant’s Yelp listing—also a big factor in choosing a dinner reservation—is packed with abysmal, almost frightening, reviews. And there are any number of reasons a restaurant—even an old, established one—can fail, as Google’s lawyers pointed out an angry June 17 motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Writers rarely get to choose their own headlines. That's why it's quite common to find completely reasonable articles with extremely sensational headlines.
The article didn't discredit anything. The title is "How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will" not "How Google Map Hackers Destroyed Serbian Crown".
But the article didn't support the title. The title supported by the article could be "How Google Map Hackers Can Contribute To The Demise Of The Restaurant On A Downhill Trajectory". This is just one sensationalist title.
Why so much hate on the headline? The article itself is perfectly reasonable, so just read and digest that. It sounds like you want to just read the title and understand everything.
I used to be a copy editor, back in the day when newspapers had copy editors. One of the jobs of a copy editor back then was to write the headline, and write an accurate one. My chief editor was tough on me, too, and it was hard to come up with a good headline that fit the space and was accurate. She often changed just one word or tense and cleared things up, but now and then she'd can my headline entirely and rewrite it.
Today? Online news sites don't care about headline accuracy, just SEO and linkbait rating. They don't even really have to care about length, to an extent. "Subject That Will Blow Your Mind and Change the Way You See the World. Top All-time. You Won’t Believe Your Eyes. Watch."
Isn't the topic in this case supposedly "How Google Maps can Destroy a Business at Will"? A topic that isn't supported by the article content (as discussed upthread)? That seems pretty "useless" to me.
Because people get sick of misleading page titles. It is obvious that the title was chosen just to get you to the page. However, the implication of the title is that Google destroyed this business by listing its hours incorrectly. I agree with
vdaniuk, the article does not support the title assigned to it. There is substantial evidence to support the position that the restaurant died for reasons other than the incorrect listing of hours.
I realize people choose page titles that are meant to grab your attention, and I don't have a problem with that in general. It just gets tiresome when the article does not discuss what you were led to believe it was going to discuss.
So where's the evidence that Google Map Hackers Can Destroy A Business at Will? I can't find it in the article. Certainly the article lists a few tactics that have worked in the past, a few loopholes that have been closed, but all of these appear to, at worst, provide temporary inconveniences.
I've eaten Kangaroo in Cambridge and it tasted delicious, and I can assure you there are no Kangaroo farms around here - the fact the meat has been frozen is not the reason for them shutting. Any place that has been around for 40 years serving food has to be doing something right, they did win the "NVM Best Restaurant" award from 2006 to 2009. You also can't blame the decor on a huge, sudden drop in customers.
I would think that perhaps the hideous website[1] played a bigger role and perhaps didn't help the situation.
And I would not be surprised to learn there is some internet activism at play here too. Someone who doesn't think people should eat [this list of animals] because of [this reason] might see this place and think "oh, if I go to Yelp and leave bad reviews, this place will close, ha ha!"
They offer an easy way for business owners to update their information. It's not difficult at all, just have to order a confirmation code to a current business address and take some other verification steps, then you can modify your business page however you like.
If the business owner doesn't understand technology, contract it out.
They do have a system for the business to give feedback on the listing; it's even discussed in the article that the Serbian Crown eventually found a web consultant that helped them correct the listing. I have no idea if it is simple.
Each of Facebook, Google+, Yelp and Foursquare (and I'm sure lots of others, those are the ones I perceive as being 'big') have buttons that say something like 'Do you own this business?' (they disappear if/when the owner updates the listing). I sort of think these local business landing pages were one of the big reasons Google worked so hard to have their own Facebook (there are still an awful lot more businesses 'on Facebook' than are doing anything with Google+).
I've planned many times to go to somewhere while still having to GPS my way there, and if the food/decor are crap, I'd suspect that's not a sudden change after 40 years.
You might be getting downvoted for the snarky tone of the first paragraph, but I think you have a point. If you're a restaurant in business for 40 years, and you don't have enough regulars who would question Google Maps telling them that you're closed on the busiest nights of the week for the restaurant industry, then I think you have problems much deeper than anything that might be happening on Google Maps.
I expect a few bad reviews - nobody runs their business in such a manner that every customer is satisfied 100% of the time. If I see nothing but outstanding reviews, I'm going to assume they're all fake.