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.
@pluralistic Google is anti-democratic. It should be a publicly accountable democratic organisation. Instead Larry and Sergey created yet another tech-monster, just with a slightly moderated profit motive because they own the controlling stake and don't care that much about profitability. Albeit enough to piss 80bn a year up the wall on buybacks.
I remember we had "startpagina" over here. A curated index of useful links per topic that became obsolete when Google search was introduced. Updating curated lists was slower so it made sense to automate it.
With language models churning out bulshit content, scam and spam and Google having no way to distinguish I suspect we will soon return to human curated lists once more.
@pluralistic I had to give up googlemaps a while ago. Shame it's used by various satnavs, because for where I live it's horribly wrong. One of the things marked as a road is actually a drainage ditch. As for the ads and scams... urgh.
Aha! It’s just another stochastic terrorist attack or planned operation to drive the population batshit resulting in mass chaos and slaughter.
Everything these days seems to belong to works of ‘fiction’: 1984, Brave New World, 7 Days In May, come to mind (I’m old) Dystopian current novels by the armload.
The first thoughts could be the seed of one of those novels. I started one very like back in 1981. In some ways I am now living it. Luckily I only wrote a few pages.
@pluralistic Yes, we are seeing a return of the days where we needed to have a varied network of associates and friends from which to get referrals and recommendations based on their experience and grounded in trust, earned and held dear. As I'm finding, for most of the rest of the world outside our little technosphere it's never been any different, and probably never should have been. The internet as it is now puts too much emphasis on self-promotion and captured attention, and there's a huge value miscalculation going on over it currently. Companies like this, popping up to grab attention and money away without providing anything of real value in return is just another altitude marker flashing past on our race to the bottom of this collapsing bubble. The other billion-and-a-half 'attention scams' being enabled by the internet are the same, and they've been able to disassemble, subvert, or make us distrust the tools of trust we had relied on before.
One good option, which does require a bit of personal rewiring on our parts, is a personal emphasis on personal networks of human contact and human interaction, which over time and practice can help us build bonds of trust with those around us in our community. Long before the web came along (at least for me in the western US), other forces were already hard at work trying to break our links to and trust in our local communities, and a car-centric suburban-sprawl cookie-cutter landscape of identical houses filled with people that drive 2+ miles to meet at a place you must pay to inhabit and hang out.
When I started to look into the cracks in my section of that society, I found flourishing cultures and groups who think and work completely differently, even in my own neighborhoods. Trying to learn more about leftism and anarcho-whatists groups ideals and thinking made me look for hints of these different approaches. Changing things like how often and where I bicycle (and for what purpose), where and how I shop, and needing to take a second, locally-centered job helped force me to learn more about these networks, and seeing them in action helping people accomplish things really makes me hopeful about a life without, perhaps in spite of, the web.
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.