Dear Reviewer, hope all's well.
Please give Maps users the option to indicate that a place is a chain or brand.
For example, see this list of McDonald's on Maps in Australia.
As a chain, each McDonald's listing on Maps should have the same name and category**, as in:
Name: McDonald's
Category: Fast food restaurant
At the moment users can add plenty of bad data to a place's name on Maps. Google's guidelines are detailed and clear for **chains and place names, yet many times these guidelines aren't followed. This makes Maps messy and waters down brand names. We're not sure if it's sabotage, miseducation or bad management.
With the option for Maps users to indicate if a place is a chain or brand, Google can automatically update the place by:
* Allocating the correct name and category
* Deleting existing bad data for name and category
As for implementation, when adding or editing places, Maps users can tick an "Is this place a chain or brand?" check box and select from a Google curated autocomplete list of known chains and brands in the region. Selecting the place from a list correctly autocompletes and greys out the name and category fields. Users attempting to enter anything other than the correct name and category would have to untick the chain and brand check box before sending the suggested edit. Human review is triggered if the name field partially matches Google's chain and brand list.
This simple mechanism creates global consistency across millions of places, goes a long way to declutter Maps at all zoom levels by removing a large percentage of spammy names and indirectly helps to educate all Maps users about how to correctly name places, chain or otherwise. It also speeds up and simplifies the process of adding new places or suggesting edits for existing chains and brands by removing redundant efforts, such as pasting/typing "McDonald's" or similar thousands of times.
Inversely, users spamming or damaging Maps with deliberate misuse can be more easily recognised and detrusted by Google, because as automated name and category for chains and brands rolls out Maps becomes cleaner world wide, which by contrast highlights oddly named places and users who add and edit those spammy places.
Google can infer much from a simple option for chains and brands on Maps. Google can know to:
* Intelligently suggest additional categories, which chains or brands may be known to sometimes have
* Ask relevant questions about the place based on other known places in the chain or brand
* Focus users on contributing local knowledge such as marker location, correct address, photos, videos, reviews, ratings and details
* Customise labels
* Offer the option to claim the place on Google My Business to official corporate managers
* Streamline Google My Business for chains and brands
* Suggest the correct official website when users are adding or editing the place
* Build and solidify chain and brand data, using user feedback and Google resources, around the world, region by region
* Reference the patterns of good data within known chains and brands to better understand the bad data for other places on Maps
* Test user interaction for correctly named versus incorrectly named places on Maps
Thank you for considering. Kind regards from Osaka78 🙂
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