You Deserve a Rake Today at Ickdonalds

Some interesting posts over at Blumenthals.com (currently one of my new favorite blogs along with Maperture) about Google’s decision to allow anyone to modify Google Maps placemarkers and the information contained within, until the listing is claimed by the true listing ‘owner’. It turns out that disgruntled customers (or employees) are taking the opportunity to disparage businesses that have wronged them by taking over their listing and doing not so nice things to it… perhaps you’ll really enjoy the fries from that Ickdonalds, even if it is strangely situated in the middle of Lake Erie!

It does bring up some interesting issues like why in the world would Google not regulate this more closely and why they feel the need to allow users to have free reign over a core part of a Google product… even when it has the potential to erode the quality of the product.

I think the answer is tied to both the economic and ideals over at Google.

While Google of course has more money than God and can and does spend money easily without a clear path to a return on investment, the time and effort it would take to develop a monitoring and filtering technology to handle this is not insignificant, particularly for something like Google Maps which is probably not yet a significant contributor of revenue. In fact Google set this precedent as the preferred modus operandi back when they acquired YouTube and opted at first just to take down copyright infringing content rather than trying to filter videos as they went up. The Viacom suit of course changed that.

What it also seems to be saying is that the current state of POI map data is not where it needs to be. Afterall, if everything was accurate and up to date, why would you need to leverage the crowdsourcing in the first place. And if Google WERE to build or license something similar to what they used to filter for copyright infringement for YouTube, they’d need a “master copy” of the “correct” data against which to cross reference… which of course doesn’t exist and would be a full time job to create and maintain… ask Navteq… and besides if they had that in the first place, there would be no need to crowdsource it and the issue would be moot.

The other part of the answer is that Google is not a content company… ie their mission “is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible” … so nothing in there about creating original information itself or ensuring the quality of the information, they just help you find it… no matter how much it may suck. So the ideal in Googleland would likely be that all the POIs just existed out there in the world and they would happily make a copy, store, index and help you find the stuff you’re looking for and be on their merry way.

But alas, all the worlds information doesn’t always cooperate they way you’d sometimes like.