2022
On of the most often heard complaints on Connect is that "I have suggested an edit/sent feedback already days/weeks/months ago, but NOTHING is done with it". I can assure you that this is not true. Feedback is processed, edits are checked, reported duplicate places are merged, but... it takes time. And the duration of that time can be anything from several days to several weeks or several months. Recently a Level 10 local guide even reported that one of his pending edits was finally approved... after 1 full year! So, it is crucial to learn to be patient.
The reason why it can take so long is that, although a huge part of the suggested edits and newly added places are approved or denied by algorithms (when you receive the verdict within seconds), quite a few of things still need to be check by intervention of humans. This can be either a Google team member or a fellow local guide. In the first case, the problem is that the lists of places or edits to be checked is quite long (and they are presumably processed in chronological order), so it can take months before the team member gets to your contribution/feedback.
In the second case - when other local guides need to verify the information you submitted (in the Check the Facts module) - the timing depends on the pure coincidence that a fellow local guide is presented with your contribution to check it. And perhaps this will never happen.
Also for feature requests and changes to the overall system, the same goes: the feedback is processed, some suggested changes are actually made, but it takes a lot of time, so plenty of patience is a needed here too. If you consider the fact that Google is a software company with loads of developers, loads of products (that might have dependencies on other products) and no doubt a lot of testing & QA before new features can be released into the live products, it is quite normal that months go by before we, as end users of those products get to notice any results.
A telling illustration from my personal experience is the missing car brands case. Back in February 2018 I first posted on Connect about the fact that for most popular car brands a separate category existed, but for some car brands there was none - at that time. For half a year, nothing happened, but then early September I noticed that some new car brand categories were available. Woo-hoo!
But the joy was short-lived. Quite quickly, it turned out that the new categories could only be used in the English interface. The result was that my suggested edits in Germany and Belgium (the 2 countries where I make most of my contributions) were approved within seconds by the algorithms, but did not show up in the local language. Fortunately, another healthy dose of patience was the solution also in this case: apparently, some things still needed to be rolled out in other languages, as some weeks later, the limitations I was experiencing had gone. That was the time of the real woo-hoo.
Other posts in this series:
Best Practice: Find new places to add to the map
Best Practice: Fix inconsistencies in chains
Best Practice: Find the right category
Best Practice: Reporting duplicates
Best Practice: Industrial Zones
Disclaimer: the practices described here as best practice are my personal interpretation, based on my hands-on experience as local guide, and I don't claim any level of official endorsement.
