Hard to overstate how enshittified and botshitted Google Maps has become. Went looking for my local locksmith on Gmaps. Maps shows 20+ fake locksmith referral scam outlets and doesn't even register the real locksmith, despite it being fully visible in Street View.
Instead, a red pin on the shop identifies it as a fake locksmith scammer. The real locksmith - which has been there SINCE 1942 (!!) and is a verified merchant - doesn't even show up.
Google has been promising to clean up locksmith scams since the early 2010s, and has completely failed.
A company that can't figure this out - but still has $80b for a stock buyback! - does not deserve the 90% market share in search it spends $26b/year to maintain.
@pluralistic nothing will get fixed until companies that offer communication services to scammers start being held liable for them.
Every phone company that accepts forged phonecall headers that mislead callers to the provenance of a scammer's call.
Every ad company that pushes ads for malware.
Every public index like Maps that redirects requests for specific, legit businesses into scammers.
If you're assisting a scammer because you did zero diligence, you need to be held liable for it.
@flxtr @Pxtl That happened to us in 2013. Not only that, giant black-screen 'attack page!' warnings came down to anyone who tried to access our sites. We found the malicious code and deleted it within hours. Google was still libelling us one week later despite claiming we would be cleared quickly by their bot.
I even found a site it was āwarningā people about seven months after it was cleaned. Needless to say, Google killed that business.
Seven months after Google blacklisted our websites over false allegations of malware, I can say that the traffic to some has not recovered. And to prove that Google continues to publish libel based on its highly dubious systems, here are two screen shots from my browser tonight, which I saw when trying to access bjskosherbaskets.com,
@flxtr Totally, having a human inside helps. I had an issue with something I was helping a friend on, and once we identified someone inside Google, the issue was fixed within a few days. It had languished on the support forums (the āproper channelsā) for six months prior, with Google cultists stonewalling and gaslighting.
It was so bad, Techdirt did a story on it.
Cory Doctorow
Pxtl
trusty falxter š§ 
Jack Yan (ēēµę©)
Krupo