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.)
Between the streetcomplete and everydoor apps, it is very very easy to do almost any OSM map editing on a mobile. Osmand (the offline map & nav app) is also useful for some edits when I don't want to leave that app.
Oh, for the simpler days when not everything required an 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.
Friend owns a construction company. Been at same address for seven years. Suddenly their Google Business Page not working right. Google says to delete it and reverify, only solution to try.
Four times my friend had to take a video: you have to start by standing on the street on the nearest intersection, film all the street signs around you to prove your location, then he had to walk down the street, show the gate with the business name on it, the vehicles with the business name on them, open the front door with the business name on it, give them a tour of the working office and show them invoices and bank statements laid out on the desk with their logo etc on it. Three times they came back and said it wasn't enough to verify.
At the same time you can go on swapd and buy GBP verification for $500 and have it verified in an hour by someone who fakes the entire thing.
Another thing they apparently do is let business owners (e.g. hotels) remove negative reviews because they're "defamatory".
I had a very factual 3-star review on a hotel that was supposedly very quiet, but was super noisy and the AC was not working. And there was literally nobody at the reception at the time of check-out and nobody picked up the phone either. All in all, nothing serious, but worth a review. Purely factual stuff, nothing bad-mouthed, just my experience and three stars.
A few months later the review was removed because it was "defamatory". I was able to get it reinstated by sending them proof of payment to the hotel and proof that I was there. A few months later, it was removed again! That same dance was repeated six times..... What a weird system.
Yet another example of how the incentives work when the platform makes its money with ad revenue. The hotel pays Google for ads and gets favorable search results. If Google then hosts a negative review, the hotel might be less inclined to advertise there. So, only positive reviews get published.
The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all, so his honest review is only worth something if it makes the advertisers happy.
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).
This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, with the dedicated ecosystems to gaming them that they develop, without this hiding. They can't afford humans to review in a minute or two what scammers can generate in fractions of a second, not even at their scale.
Now, I'm enough of a fan of decentralization and the destruction of these massive sites with way too much control to say that I'm perfectly comfortable saying that they should be mandated to handle these things more sensibly and with more humans. That such a plan would have the side effect of breaking them up into vastly, vastly smaller pieces, causing an technological Cambrian explosion of various sites and diversity resulting in the parasites no longer being able to focus all their firepower on a very small set of targets, is for me a bonus, if not the main goal. However, I, and anyone who agrees with me on this, is rather clearly in the minority.
In the meantime, if we're going to have things the size of Google or Facebook, there simply is no solution where we all get human review whenever we ask for it, because instantly every spammer and abuser will ask for the human review. There just isn't a solution. It looks like there is an obvious solution when you consider "how will Google review this one application" but that's not the landscape Google faces. They have to solve the problem of how to deal with the entire landscape of requests they face at once.
I've sent in corrections to Apple Maps in Portugal (shopping mall is 1km away from the location on Apple Maps) and Canada (speed camera does not exist). Both were taken care of within a couple of days.
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.
When I lived in Jersey City, I committed the crime of living at a 1/2 address.
Literally nothing could get delivered to me if they used a Google Maps address bar. My address just didn't exist at all to that search bar. It could be found on maps, just not on that little search bar widget.
I ended up just putting my neighbors address and either intercepting delivery drivers or putting in the notes that I was at the half address next door.
Moral of the story: check your potential address BEFORE you move in
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.
Another path may be to add the business to OpenStreetMap first; I get the impression that Google will scrape changes to OSM and add them to it's dataset. (I've seen several small changes I've made only to OSM get propagated to GMaps a few weeks later. Possibly it's a coincidence, but when the features are exactly the same shape as the ones I drew in OSM, I get suspicious.)
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
These companies have correctly figured out that customers will still give them money, even if they provide no customer support, are actively hostile to their customers, and only respond to lawsuits. Such a weird timeline we are on! People willingly do business with companies who are actively against them.
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
>The fact that we're allowing companies to get away with bullshit like this is ludicrous to me.
If they decide to not reply it becomes much more resource consuming to go down the legal road.
I had this with DoorDash, even if you call they just say some specialised team needs to look at it and they'll email you back, surprise, they never do.
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.
> I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.
If you were willing to upload your driver's license and passport for a mere chance at getting back an account you don't give a crap about I'd hate to see what you'd do for one you do care about! Facebook demanded my driver's license at one point out of the blue. I simply abandoned the account, I was already pretty over them at that point anyway. About a year later it let me log in just fine and had forgotten all about how badly it had needed a scan of my license for security. In fact I didn't even remember the password, it just auto logged in from an email link.
You kind of confirm what I suspected though, that they'll just keep asking for more stuff leaving you more exposed and they're under no obligation to actually give you the account back no matter what you do.
I don't use discord but IIRC I read that if your account was banned they were asking for a mobile number to get it back. Instead of getting it back if you complied they just added the mobile number to their ban list so you couldn't make a new account with 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.
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.
> doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing
If we lived in a sane world, Google would be held accountable for every scam they advertise. It doesn't matter if you think someone deserved to get scammed for using an ad blocker, because they never would have been scammed if Google didn't choose to put them in danger for the sake of profit.
"But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case, then they should scale down the amount of ads they allow until it reaches a manageable scale (eg every single ad can be reviewed by a human employee). They might make less money, but it's an expectation we have of nearly all industries (eg commercial truck drivers have to follow extra restrictions in addition to regular speed limits)
> 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
I see where you are coming from, but getting burned by a scam Google advertised to me just pushed me to cutting Google out of my life completely. If it were the occasional bad actor slipping through I might have been more forgiving, but the scam that got to me had become well known for at least the last 18 months. If Google doesn't care enough to keep the well known bad actors off their service, then I protect myself & my family by blocking Google.
Low quality ads should be the bottom of the barrel. Actual criminal activity should not be anywhere in the barrel.
That might make sense, but to clarify, my dad has disabled his ad blocker a few months ago by accident, so he’s fair game. An older guy too, I guess that’s why there were so many scams.
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.
You're missing the fact that all ads are scammy and I don't want to see any of them. There's nothing that makes a Downy ad more honest or relevant to me than an ad for BigCoin Online Casino - it's all worthless trash that conveys zero genuine information about the product. At least the bottom tier ads are honest about what they are.
Sometimes I am convinced that there are no good products and so all advertising must happen for bad products.
I mean how often do you see an ad for a product, buy it (not even from the ad itself, maybe from a recommendation from a friend) and you are happy with the product and think the ad was truthful?
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.
I mean sure that makes sense - but the OP isn’t even getting any information to confirm or deny this. If that’s the case Google should explain the issue.
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...
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?
Just a data point: UK Mobile Broadband resolves the product site fine. (I have not registered with my credit card so the 'adult and malicious site' filter is still in place). As other posters have mentioned perhaps the name itself is triggering some kinds of filtering?
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.
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.
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 noticed this around homebrew install style key words. People blindly copy and paste a shel script that is given sudo on a fresh install. Seems pretty ideal setup for bad guys.
Yup, I was had by a malicious fake Homebrew site that had the #1 spot in Google thanks to it being an ad (a key fact that was very unclear at the time of browsing Google)
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.
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.
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.
My Adsense account got automatically disabled years ago, allegedly for click fraud (no such behaviour on my part) and there was no effective way for me to appeal.
I'm now a huge supporter of any initiative or law that attempts to break Google's stranglehold on online advertising. They have placed too much responsibility in their broken automation, and they are a bad faith actor in the space.
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?
I've used adblockers, revanced, and whatever else for years, so I don't see many ads, but every time I'm on a computer without this stuff installed I am appalled by how many scams get through. At some point, Google must have realized that nobody is going to come after them for selling ad space to scammers (possibly because of section 230 of the CDA?) and hey, scammers are willing to pay enough for it to be worth it.
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.
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.)
This is what I do now, got jack of Google throwing my contributions back in my face.
They also only email if your contribution is successful. If it's declined you'll only know by looking inside Google Maps.
Contributing to an open dataset also feels really good.
Between the streetcomplete and everydoor apps, it is very very easy to do almost any OSM map editing on a mobile. Osmand (the offline map & nav app) is also useful for some edits when I don't want to leave that app.
Oh, for the simpler days when not everything required an 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.
> you might not have permission to use the data
Isn't it fair use, like training data?
Friend owns a construction company. Been at same address for seven years. Suddenly their Google Business Page not working right. Google says to delete it and reverify, only solution to try.
Four times my friend had to take a video: you have to start by standing on the street on the nearest intersection, film all the street signs around you to prove your location, then he had to walk down the street, show the gate with the business name on it, the vehicles with the business name on them, open the front door with the business name on it, give them a tour of the working office and show them invoices and bank statements laid out on the desk with their logo etc on it. Three times they came back and said it wasn't enough to verify.
At the same time you can go on swapd and buy GBP verification for $500 and have it verified in an hour by someone who fakes the entire thing.
Another thing they apparently do is let business owners (e.g. hotels) remove negative reviews because they're "defamatory".
I had a very factual 3-star review on a hotel that was supposedly very quiet, but was super noisy and the AC was not working. And there was literally nobody at the reception at the time of check-out and nobody picked up the phone either. All in all, nothing serious, but worth a review. Purely factual stuff, nothing bad-mouthed, just my experience and three stars.
A few months later the review was removed because it was "defamatory". I was able to get it reinstated by sending them proof of payment to the hotel and proof that I was there. A few months later, it was removed again! That same dance was repeated six times..... What a weird system.
I'm surprised you knew it was removed. All my negative reviews appear visible to me when logged in and disappear when logged out.
Only sure fire way I've found is to leave a two star review with no body. One star without a body is also shadowbanned for me.
Yet another example of how the incentives work when the platform makes its money with ad revenue. The hotel pays Google for ads and gets favorable search results. If Google then hosts a negative review, the hotel might be less inclined to advertise there. So, only positive reviews get published.
The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all, so his honest review is only worth something if it makes the advertisers happy.
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).
This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, with the dedicated ecosystems to gaming them that they develop, without this hiding. They can't afford humans to review in a minute or two what scammers can generate in fractions of a second, not even at their scale.
Now, I'm enough of a fan of decentralization and the destruction of these massive sites with way too much control to say that I'm perfectly comfortable saying that they should be mandated to handle these things more sensibly and with more humans. That such a plan would have the side effect of breaking them up into vastly, vastly smaller pieces, causing an technological Cambrian explosion of various sites and diversity resulting in the parasites no longer being able to focus all their firepower on a very small set of targets, is for me a bonus, if not the main goal. However, I, and anyone who agrees with me on this, is rather clearly in the minority.
In the meantime, if we're going to have things the size of Google or Facebook, there simply is no solution where we all get human review whenever we ask for it, because instantly every spammer and abuser will ask for the human review. There just isn't a solution. It looks like there is an obvious solution when you consider "how will Google review this one application" but that's not the landscape Google faces. They have to solve the problem of how to deal with the entire landscape of requests they face at once.
Apple Maps maybe?
Apple Maps is much better in my experience. I've never had an update rejected.
I've sent in corrections to Apple Maps in Portugal (shopping mall is 1km away from the location on Apple Maps) and Canada (speed camera does not exist). Both were taken care of within a couple of days.
At least in my personal experience, Apple Maps is much worse at up to date business information than Google is
But when I've submitted updates to road changes a couple of times, they did go through
Apple Maps has Apple Ads and Apple Ads are awful.
Why would they fix it when you guys find workarounds to get it done anyway?
I bet they'd care if their data started going stale because nobody bothered to update it.
Because most people would stop on the first blockage.
I'm surprised you tried so many times to do Google's job for them.
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.
When I lived in Jersey City, I committed the crime of living at a 1/2 address.
Literally nothing could get delivered to me if they used a Google Maps address bar. My address just didn't exist at all to that search bar. It could be found on maps, just not on that little search bar widget.
I ended up just putting my neighbors address and either intercepting delivery drivers or putting in the notes that I was at the half address next door.
Moral of the story: check your potential address BEFORE you move in
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.
Another path may be to add the business to OpenStreetMap first; I get the impression that Google will scrape changes to OSM and add them to it's dataset. (I've seen several small changes I've made only to OSM get propagated to GMaps a few weeks later. Possibly it's a coincidence, but when the features are exactly the same shape as the ones I drew in OSM, I get suspicious.)
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.
Kudos for you for trying 4 times.
The lesson here is: don’t do free work for corporations.
I don't even fill out surveys anymore for the most part, unless it gets me a discount or something.
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
These companies have correctly figured out that customers will still give them money, even if they provide no customer support, are actively hostile to their customers, and only respond to lawsuits. Such a weird timeline we are on! People willingly do business with companies who are actively against them.
> small claims court (I’m not joking they don’t even care about that)
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...)
Depending on the jurisdiction, getting a judgement alone doesn't allow you to have a bailiff enforce it.
Yes, you can win in small claims if the other party doesn't show. I suspect a plane might exceed the "small claims" limit though!
€890 is apparently enough https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/13/bailiffs-bo...
The limit applies to what you can claim, rather than what you can impound in enforcing the court order.
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
>The fact that we're allowing companies to get away with bullshit like this is ludicrous to me.
If they decide to not reply it becomes much more resource consuming to go down the legal road.
I had this with DoorDash, even if you call they just say some specialised team needs to look at it and they'll email you back, surprise, they never do.
The fact that this has become acceptable is the real problem.
You don't want to harm the economy, do you?
I'm sure the people who will get hurt have plenty of money.
Same with Amazon Japan. It blocked my account with no way to contact them, never used again.
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.
> I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.
If you were willing to upload your driver's license and passport for a mere chance at getting back an account you don't give a crap about I'd hate to see what you'd do for one you do care about! Facebook demanded my driver's license at one point out of the blue. I simply abandoned the account, I was already pretty over them at that point anyway. About a year later it let me log in just fine and had forgotten all about how badly it had needed a scan of my license for security. In fact I didn't even remember the password, it just auto logged in from an email link.
You kind of confirm what I suspected though, that they'll just keep asking for more stuff leaving you more exposed and they're under no obligation to actually give you the account back no matter what you do.
I don't use discord but IIRC I read that if your account was banned they were asking for a mobile number to get it back. Instead of getting it back if you complied they just added the mobile number to their ban list so you couldn't make a new account with it.
> I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.
That's not a good practice to begin with. Your insta account doesn't matter but your privacy and government-issued documents do matter.
Meta knows you work for them, and sees it as boosting or gaming the algo.
There are a gazillion accounts that do this constantly, and all of them appeal.
> uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport
Sounds like its working as designed. This is why you never cross streams between work and personal life.
> 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.
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...
Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625933 - is it actually enforced?
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.
> doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing
If we lived in a sane world, Google would be held accountable for every scam they advertise. It doesn't matter if you think someone deserved to get scammed for using an ad blocker, because they never would have been scammed if Google didn't choose to put them in danger for the sake of profit.
"But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case, then they should scale down the amount of ads they allow until it reaches a manageable scale (eg every single ad can be reviewed by a human employee). They might make less money, but it's an expectation we have of nearly all industries (eg commercial truck drivers have to follow extra restrictions in addition to regular speed limits)
Yes. "At our scale, we can't possibly do X" is a reason to not scale. It's not a reason to dodge doing X.
> 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
I see where you are coming from, but getting burned by a scam Google advertised to me just pushed me to cutting Google out of my life completely. If it were the occasional bad actor slipping through I might have been more forgiving, but the scam that got to me had become well known for at least the last 18 months. If Google doesn't care enough to keep the well known bad actors off their service, then I protect myself & my family by blocking Google.
Low quality ads should be the bottom of the barrel. Actual criminal activity should not be anywhere in the barrel.
That might make sense, but to clarify, my dad has disabled his ad blocker a few months ago by accident, so he’s fair game. An older guy too, I guess that’s why there were so many scams.
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.
You're missing the fact that all ads are scammy and I don't want to see any of them. There's nothing that makes a Downy ad more honest or relevant to me than an ad for BigCoin Online Casino - it's all worthless trash that conveys zero genuine information about the product. At least the bottom tier ads are honest about what they are.
I went through a phase of reporting scams and every single time my report was rejected.
I guess I shouldn’t have expected any differently when their income is dependent on displaying those scam ads.
As long as it makes them money, they're incapable of caring.
Make them liable for what they show, and watch them suddenly discover they are able to care a lot.
Sometimes I am convinced that there are no good products and so all advertising must happen for bad products.
I mean how often do you see an ad for a product, buy it (not even from the ad itself, maybe from a recommendation from a friend) and you are happy with the product and think the ad was truthful?
We had that, almost a decade ago.
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.
I mean sure that makes sense - but the OP isn’t even getting any information to confirm or deny this. If that’s the case Google should explain the issue.
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...
Congratulations. They must have been worried about your circular graphic at the bottom of your post!
Did they address what the fix was?
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?
Just a data point: UK Mobile Broadband resolves the product site fine. (I have not registered with my credit card so the 'adult and malicious site' filter is still in place). As other posters have mentioned perhaps the name itself is triggering some kinds of filtering?
Seems not to be blacklisted, but I see the domain is only 22 days old, so that'll be it I imagine.
Looking forward to the update where his vibe-coded site has been compromised and is being used as a C&C server
I hope so.
It's hard finding a good Command & Conquer server nowdays
Natch!
According to the article it's a static site served from cloudflare. That would be quite the compromise.
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.
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.
Lol. Haven't thought about that. Now I'll have to ponder shouldn't I add another domain to the mix.
Probably a regexp. Easiest to implement. Clbuttic.
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.
Doesnt help, when official government websites ( usps.com ) are on the commercial suffix, and not .gov
Google doesn't care. They advertise online betting to kids, because those platforms now have some "free" online games.
Uhhh.. They actively particpated in the sluaghter of over 10k children in the last two years and fired all their employeess who spoke up regarding it.
The real question is why you would spend money to advertise to probably the most advertising adverse, and ad-bloc literate, demographic?
I noticed this around homebrew install style key words. People blindly copy and paste a shel script that is given sudo on a fresh install. Seems pretty ideal setup for bad guys.
Yup, I was had by a malicious fake Homebrew site that had the #1 spot in Google thanks to it being an ad (a key fact that was very unclear at the time of browsing Google)
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.
Google treats its customers so blindly. in short, Google is not user centric company at all.
Google treats its customers like a monopolist.
You should take your ad viewing elsewhere in protest.
Yep. Straight to the pie hole.
wave
Check if chrome flags your site as malware. If it does, hire a lawyer and sue them for defamation.
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.
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.
They are begging you to spend your ad budget elsewhere.
> You can position and resize terminals freely instead of squeezing everything into a uniform grid
yes please!
If you decided you like it enough to get a license code HNMAGIC will get you 50% off (valid for 24 hours for anyone to pick :))
My Adsense account got automatically disabled years ago, allegedly for click fraud (no such behaviour on my part) and there was no effective way for me to appeal.
I'm now a huge supporter of any initiative or law that attempts to break Google's stranglehold on online advertising. They have placed too much responsibility in their broken automation, and they are a bad faith actor in the space.
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?
I've used adblockers, revanced, and whatever else for years, so I don't see many ads, but every time I'm on a computer without this stuff installed I am appalled by how many scams get through. At some point, Google must have realized that nobody is going to come after them for selling ad space to scammers (possibly because of section 230 of the CDA?) and hey, scammers are willing to pay enough for it to be worth it.
So you are guy whose weired and malicious ad destroyed my system
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.
Maybe Google have detectors of some sites that are mostly vibe-coded also being associated with AI slop.
Also why use Google Ads in the first place? Given that HNers and technical users are extremely allergic to that?
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 :)
Detectors can clearly identify the exact issues. So, what are those issues here? We know, but we don't want to tell our cash-paying customers.
Because the proportion of "HNers and technical users" in the general population is vanishingly small.
> RACE is a native macOS terminal multiplexer written in Rust.
Pretty sure they are not targeting the general population with this product.
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.
> Maybe Google have detectors of some sites that are mostly vibe-coded also being associated with AI slop.
That is definitely not the case. At least 90% of google results are AI slop now.
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.
No, the business controlling side has decided that it's ok to have scams as ads as long as that makes money.
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.
They made over one hundred billion dollars last year. Seems like by and large they're doing their jobs pretty well.
Oh, you expected them to care about users? Lol, lmao even.