The millions of organizations that are listed on Google Maps do not actually exist and have never existed. This was revealed thanks to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal. Of the 200 million places added to Google Maps over the years, about 11 million are false.
How does this happen? Business owners place their offices on maps to make their companies appear more often in search results, and there can be up to 10 fake addresses for the same organization. Particularly smart ones guess to change the phone numbers and addresses of competitors to their own, so that customers would turn to them.
The Wall Street Journal contacted Google, and only after that the corporation began to fight against false addresses. In a comment, representatives of the search giant said that they regularly identify scammers and conduct checks on addresses, but this is not too much to believe. Thus, according to the WSJ, two years ago Google itself sponsored a study by the University of California at San Diego, according to the results of which only 0.5% of the total number of searches can lead to fraudsters. Journalists believe that this data is greatly underestimated.
Many users have complained that there are indeed a lot of false addresses in Google maps. So, Nancy Carter from Washington State spent more than three hours to find a service center to repair the garage door mechanism. Before that, she went to two places, guided by Google Maps: at one address there was a grocery store, at the other there was a transformer booth.
It is not entirely clear why Google does not conduct more checks against unscrupulous organizations, because in the first place, inaccuracies in the search have a negative impact on the map service itself. Yes, the company boasts that Google Maps has “hundreds of millions of new places,” but is it worth it? Moreover, the search engine says that they have recently blocked more than 150 thousand users who "violated the terms of use of Google services."
Alexander Bogdanov