Google has forgotten the plot. A quick tangent story follows: I attempted to add a Tesla Supercharger as it went live to Google Maps. I was the very first to pay to recharge at the new location. The process went something like this:
1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes.
2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes.
3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes.
4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute.
5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.
FWIW, editing OpenStreetMap is very straightforward*, and with that, you're actually contributing to an open data set that everyone is allowed to use, rather than just propping up Google.
(To be fair, on a laptop - I'm sure Google Maps is more straightforward on a phone. But for someone already prepared to invest this much effort, editing OSM should be well within range. And if you just enjoy contributing to maps, for a phone I can highly recommend https://streetcomplete.app.)
Wasn't making street plans from satellite pictures ruled transformative? So if you get an AI to make street plans from Google maps, satellite layer, you're not violating copyright are you?
Bing Maps allows the OpenStreetMap community to trace from aerial_imagery
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Aerial_imagery Google doesn't. How much a tool helps somebody to draw the actual roads varies by editor software used, some have plugins. Using AI in bulk isn't allowed afaik.
If you obtain the satellite images directly from Google Maps, you can still have problems because you might not have permission to use the data. That's not copyright though.
I've stopped believing in the accuracy of Google maps after my experience at my last apartment. The ground floor of my building was a deli with an address like 123 4th Ave, and the entrance to the deli was basically facing the corner itself rather than either side of the cross street, and my apartment's address (using the placeholder above as a reference) was 123 4th Ave Apt. 2R. All of the apartments had a separate entrance than the deli that was further down the block past the deli on 4th Ave. The problem was that the cross street (let's call it 5th Street) also had an building with the same number two doors down, and for whatever reason, Google Maps put the address marker for the entirety of 123 4th Ave on 5th Street, and even more annoyingly, they showed the way of getting to my apartment as going into the deli's entrance first, which made no sense because there is absolutely no way to get to the apartments from inside the deli without either going outside or I guess teleporting through the ceiling. When trying to get something delivered to my apartment, the delivery people would often look at Google Maps, see the marker on 5th Street, look for the 123 marker, and then go and ring the bell for 123 5th Street instead of actually going onto 4th Ave and ringing our bell. I tried to contact Google Maps to get this addressed (pun intended), but I was told that they did not have a way to have separate entrances for different parts of the same address, and they told me to get a new separate address from the city. I responded that the city of New York would probably not issue a new address for a building I didn't own and that they could solve the problem by just moving the pin over to the 4th Ave side of the corner instead of the 5th Street side since the entrance pointed out diagonally and no one would have trouble finding it still if they did that. I never got a response, and all of my attempts to submit a correction directly got ignored.
I've found that if you attach any pictures at all: rejected.
So what I've taken to doing is adding the business without photos (almost always accepted), and then trying to attach the photos later after that goes live (mostly works). But I agree, their process is completely broken, and I doubt they have any incentive to fix it.
Question here then, is when will we see a competitor enter the market who both cares about getting it right and is actually able to compete with google maps
Having seen the abuse vectors that get thrown at this and similar products, I suspect it is less about whether they care and more about finding a suitable threshold for some arbitrary features, or moments of demand exceeding the available moderators. The repetitive 6 minutes make me suspect there are reports timing out in the moderator queue and the automod doesn't like images or something.
Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.
I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.
Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).
Had similar experience trying to add a restaurant to Google Maps, our own even. First time, rejected because didn't exist, it did. Second time, they say they sent a letter, and they see that someone received it, no one did. We wait a month, they say they sent another letter, we wait another month. Nothing, and now they stopped replying too. Wait another month, suddenly the restauarant magically exists on Google Maps, with the wrong images, wrong address, wrong open times, but the pin is the right place at least, so I guess that's cool. Took another month or two to force through all the corrections too.
This was made 2-3 years ago, probably worse today. Absolutely horrific experience, and they have zero motivation to fix it, because people like us still want to be on Google Maps, especially if you're not in a super good location, so people can actually find you.
I tried to remove a not-anoymore-existing company I had a business profile before from Google Maps. I was close to giving up, it's such a complicated process that is fully intransparent.
Google is the worst offender, but a lot of companies are increasingly hiding themselves behind a wall of automated systems to completely neuter users ability to challenge any decision unilaterally taken by the them. The LLM-age has worsen the situation but it started well before it.
At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.
It’s a strategy. Ask RyanAir. They systematically shut down any way to communicate with them, except lawsuits.
Tried their chatbot, hotline, email, letter, fax, small claims court (I’m not joking they don’t even care about that). Unless you turn up with a court order and confiscate a plane, they simply won’t give a fuck, and I’m sure it’s a tactic to deter 99% of their problems before they start
British Airways is the same. After they wrongfully didn't let me board my flight I had to escalate to the Dutch aviation authority (ILT, they sided in my favor within 3 days of me sending my letter in, that's how blatantly in the right I was) in order to get them to stop ignoring my emails, and even with the letter from ILT I still had to escalate to CEDR and they still took forever to compensate me what I was owed after legally being bound to do so. Along the way they tried every scummy tactic that exists, including sending me an email to close my CEDR case and they pinky promise they'll compensate me if I do that (which should be HIGHLY illegal but apparently isn't). They even went over the legally enforced time limits! They had 2 months after CEDR made their ruling in my favor to pay me back, and I STILL had to hound them after 2 and a half months to get my fucking money!
If I wasn't as idiotically stubborn as I am, I would've given up a month into the 8 month ordeal it eventually turned into. I guarantee you the vast majority of people wouldn't bother escalating to their CAA, or contact the relevant courts or authorities, which is what these scummy tactics are designed for. They would've been ignored like I did, then they would've given up because what's even the point?
The fact that we're allowing companies to get away with bullshit like this is ludicrous to me
> At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.
Funny you should say that. I'm not a big Instagram user, but have had an account for years. The company I work for has just started an Instagram campaign, and asked anyone who wanted to, to check out their campaign and give it a like. I did so, and a minute later received this email:
"Your Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.
If you think that we made a mistake, you have until 8 March 2027 to appeal."
I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.
My latest rejection says I have only one more chance. No idea what the transgression was, but apparently there is no recourse.
I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.
That’s surprising, because in my opinion Google doesn’t care about malicious anything. The other day I had to look for something on YouTube on my dad’s computer with a disabled ad-blocker. I saw like 30 ads in 15 minutes, every single one of them was a scam, literally not a single non-fraudulent ad. Google is full cartoon villain evil at this point.
The more you ad-block and tracker block, the more scammy the ads when you take down the guards.
People who never do any sort of blocking are the most valuable ad-targets, and hence get the highest bids when their views are auctioned. They get Toyota, Coke, and Downy ads.
Scam advertisers are bottom feeders and the "advertiser of last resort". Google doesn't really care that much about people with blank profiles, and why would they, these people use their services and contribute nothing back. I don't think Google is vindictive, but it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block.
That's interesting to note. So the fact that there is less data about someone makes them a preferred target for the bottom of the advertising bucket. Is there an equivalent in the paper world? I remember those old paper magazines that were constantly about aliens or other conspiracies. Maybe the same effect?
They aren't preferred targets so much as they are the cheapest targets.
These scam ads are trying to play the numbers game that email spammers do. So they just bid on everyone at the minimum bid. For people with fleshed out ad-profiles, the big advertisers that pay decent money will buy those slots. The auctions almost never fall through.
For people with no profile, no one bids, and the auction falls through to the scammer who will pay $0.00001 for their ad to load.
So ironically, the (second?) best way to remove scammy ads from google is to keep loading ads from google.
The cause was that the site was in fact compromised and at a certain very discreet URL it hosted a bunch of pages for legit products that linked to external shady sites. They got in through some PHP hole. Got lucky they didn't do more damage. However as per various Google pages and dashboards no issues were present except being tagged as a malware distribution site.
The remedy was to audit the site, clean it up and then re-submit the appeal. Got the tag cleared in a couple hours.
FYI https://race-term.com is blocked by NCSC's Protective DNS service using my UK University's connection. Are you sure your domain is not blacklisted somewhere?
My work web filter is blocking it as well due to "newly registered and observed domains", but I don't think Google should be using that as a heuristic.
When you search "us passport" or "tsa precheck" on Google, you constantly see promoted ad results impersonating government sites (ie passportvisarush.com or easegov.com) extracting and selling your PII (social security number, etc) from your application.
I've reported the ads multiple times, but new ones still end up being promoted. I'm sure these companies have mined and sold thousands of SSN/address/DOB info from unsuspecting users.
I'm guessing "race term" got automatically flagged because it can be understood as "word or expression that refers to a racial group or to race/ethnicity" i.e. an euphemism for a slur.
I made an update, but I'll post also here in comments.
It seems that either a human read it or it triggered some trigger, but my account has been reinstated. Thank you, also those who made this issue visible.
On one side I'm happy it happened, on the other, it's a shame that it took complaining on the internet amplified by HackerNews to get this problem fixed...
Had the same issue. In the end, getting pulled into some Google Ads sales funnel and them solving the issue through internal tickets helped. Spent $1000 on useless ads in the process, but have an "unlocked" account now. Really disappointing customer experience.
Ah yes, i got an account suspended on play console due to inactivity. The new help system has been "improved" in the sense that it is directly inside play console, so of course i can't appeal or request to reinstate or transfer the app ids to a new account, because THE CURRENT ACCOUNT IS CLOSED AND I AM ALWAYS REDIRECTED TO A PAGE THAT TELLS THAT THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED.
So i tried appealing using another console account. After about a week i got the usual automated response stating that my previous report was auto-translated into english (i wrote it in fucking english of course) and some generic babble about what happened.
To which i replied that i have no problem opening a new account using the old email, but i'd want to know beforehand if i'd keep, or how to retain, the package IDs so it's not going to be a fucking painful mess to tell customers to reinstall.
And of course i got the same autogenerated email, with a couple new lines summarizing the first part.
I feel for the author, it is literally impossible to talk to a human there.
Neat terminal, I've been building the same thing in my free time but haven't reached a point where it is complete / stable enough for being my daily driver.
Have you (anyone) actually sticked to the way of working this enables, or is this just a gimmick?
This is my driver since it become usable. I have 140 terminals on 2 workspaces. Grouped by project/task. I know, I'm the author, so I'm biased, but I love working using it.
I really wonder about these youtube ads for these (non-existing, AI slop) incel games... it's always the same pattern, a man is exploited and/or rejected by a woman who gets everything for free he has taken from him, is spat on and whatnot, then starts his quest to fight the demoness or whatever. Are there any articles about those and the companies behind them?
Anthropic is terrible too. I couldn’t rectify my spending versus my usage. Automated assistant shows me where things are that I am already asking about. Gets escalated and person doesn’t respond to my question. Back to automated with multiple requests to escalate before they will do it
Behavior like Google's monopolistic behavior here in turn enables other monopolies - if distributing your own software puts you at risk of being arbitrarily banned by advertisers, deranked in search, blocked by virus scanners, etc without recourse, you're going to end up leaning on app stores like Steam, Google Play, etc because they have a shortcut through all the red tape.
My Show HN failed. Might resubmit some time later, but HN (in general) is a lucky draw. And also I figured that trying to sell a indie software might be a good idea for own business and HN can't help with getting enough potential customers :)
Except that his product is for technical users as well as HNers here? I won't expect the "general population" that use Google to care about this software.
Interestingly how everyone is talking about 'Google', this faceless entity.. but in essence there are humans who work there, employees not doing their job properly. Lazy, detached, disinterested .. with no consequences for coasting.. Or are badly organized/managed, have the wrong incentives, are burned out, going through a divorce, performance review, whatever..
People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal.
At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.
A true full-time Google employee is like three layers of outsourcing removed from touching these operations. The people doing the work have been given zero latitude to actually help someone.
And then the design and implementation of the process itself is split across access silos mediated by lawyers and program managers. It's deliberately physically impossible for a motivated employee to improve the system for users.
More likely, overworked and underpaid. Some employee in $farOffLand working 10 hour shifts for $4/hr with a quota^W target of appeals-per-hour to meet.
1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes.
2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes.
3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes.
4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute.
5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.
(To be fair, on a laptop - I'm sure Google Maps is more straightforward on a phone. But for someone already prepared to invest this much effort, editing OSM should be well within range. And if you just enjoy contributing to maps, for a phone I can highly recommend https://streetcomplete.app.)
So what I've taken to doing is adding the business without photos (almost always accepted), and then trying to attach the photos later after that goes live (mostly works). But I agree, their process is completely broken, and I doubt they have any incentive to fix it.
Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.
I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.
Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).
But when I've submitted updates to road changes a couple of times, they did go through
I bet they'd care if their data started going stale because nobody bothered to update it.
This was made 2-3 years ago, probably worse today. Absolutely horrific experience, and they have zero motivation to fix it, because people like us still want to be on Google Maps, especially if you're not in a super good location, so people can actually find you.
Kudos for you for trying 4 times.
At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.
If they don't show up, doesn't that mean you win by default? (And then you can indeed send a bailiff to seize a plane...)
If I wasn't as idiotically stubborn as I am, I would've given up a month into the 8 month ordeal it eventually turned into. I guarantee you the vast majority of people wouldn't bother escalating to their CAA, or contact the relevant courts or authorities, which is what these scummy tactics are designed for. They would've been ignored like I did, then they would've given up because what's even the point?
The fact that we're allowing companies to get away with bullshit like this is ludicrous to me
This is already implemented, under the EU's Digital Services Act, you can appeal and get specifics about account terminations - see https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...
"Your Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.
If you think that we made a mistake, you have until 8 March 2027 to appeal."
I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.
My latest rejection says I have only one more chance. No idea what the transgression was, but apparently there is no recourse.
I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.
That's not a good practice to begin with. Your insta account doesn't matter but your privacy and government-issued documents do matter.
Sounds like its working as designed. This is why you never cross streams between work and personal life.
There are a gazillion accounts that do this constantly, and all of them appeal.
People who never do any sort of blocking are the most valuable ad-targets, and hence get the highest bids when their views are auctioned. They get Toyota, Coke, and Downy ads.
Scam advertisers are bottom feeders and the "advertiser of last resort". Google doesn't really care that much about people with blank profiles, and why would they, these people use their services and contribute nothing back. I don't think Google is vindictive, but it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block.
These scam ads are trying to play the numbers game that email spammers do. So they just bid on everyone at the minimum bid. For people with fleshed out ad-profiles, the big advertisers that pay decent money will buy those slots. The auctions almost never fall through.
For people with no profile, no one bids, and the auction falls through to the scammer who will pay $0.00001 for their ad to load.
So ironically, the (second?) best way to remove scammy ads from google is to keep loading ads from google.
I guess I shouldn’t have expected any differently when their income is dependent on displaying those scam ads.
Make them liable for what they show, and watch them suddenly discover they are able to care a lot.
The cause was that the site was in fact compromised and at a certain very discreet URL it hosted a bunch of pages for legit products that linked to external shady sites. They got in through some PHP hole. Got lucky they didn't do more damage. However as per various Google pages and dashboards no issues were present except being tagged as a malware distribution site.
The remedy was to audit the site, clean it up and then re-submit the appeal. Got the tag cleared in a couple hours.
It's hard finding a good Command & Conquer server nowdays
I've reported the ads multiple times, but new ones still end up being promoted. I'm sure these companies have mined and sold thousands of SSN/address/DOB info from unsuspecting users.
On one side I'm happy it happened, on the other, it's a shame that it took complaining on the internet amplified by HackerNews to get this problem fixed...
So i tried appealing using another console account. After about a week i got the usual automated response stating that my previous report was auto-translated into english (i wrote it in fucking english of course) and some generic babble about what happened.
To which i replied that i have no problem opening a new account using the old email, but i'd want to know beforehand if i'd keep, or how to retain, the package IDs so it's not going to be a fucking painful mess to tell customers to reinstall.
And of course i got the same autogenerated email, with a couple new lines summarizing the first part.
I feel for the author, it is literally impossible to talk to a human there.
Have you (anyone) actually sticked to the way of working this enables, or is this just a gimmick?
yes please!
Also why use Google Ads in the first place? Given that HNers and technical users are extremely allergic to that?
Pretty sure they are not targeting the general population with this product.
That is definitely not the case. At least 90% of google results are AI slop now.
People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal.
At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.
And then the design and implementation of the process itself is split across access silos mediated by lawyers and program managers. It's deliberately physically impossible for a motivated employee to improve the system for users.
Oh, you expected them to care about users? Lol, lmao even.