I never came here to get responses from Google. I come here to get help and advice from fellow LGs, and I'm never disappointed with the responses. That is still the case.
The way I see it, this community exists so we can help each other, not to petition for official responses. It's nice that we also have one or two admins who can share some inside scoop with us, but that's more of a bonus, not the reason this place exists, as far as I'm concerned.
@OStr Well, if this isn't the place to have official answers, can you tell me the right place? Is there somewhere? Since we LGs do this for free, and I'm sure GM makes a lot of profit from it, why can't someone give us official data? It's something I don't understand.
I'm facing the same problem and thought there is a problem with my account until I found this post and decide to wait. However the number of miss map marker, duplicate or new not-exist places is increasing so high lately in my city.
Not long ago I have a conversation with an online taxi driver and I found it quite surprising.
So this online taxi driver and his groups are like to adding duplicate places or moving map marker of a place to somewhere else with the attention of getting more "order/job (profit)" from their online application.
Example:
A group of driver duplicate of a bus stop called "Halte Busway Adam Malik" with "Busway Stop Budi Luhur" and "Shelter Adam Malik", they all are the same but there is people who like to call it one way or another so they make a duplicate of it to make people easier to order an online transportation.
This problem is already frustrated me enough.
Yet I can't believe I found there is even some other groups of driver creating duplicate of a place with a farther map marker or even moving the original map markerfarther to trick people and got a farther distance to gain more profit from distance calculation payment.
I don't know if this trouble happen anywhere else besides my country/city and the cause of "NOT APPLIED" problem or not but I need help for this case. I try to edit this places but Google Maps kept gave me Not Applied, ugh! this problem is really mess up the Google Maps where I live in, help me!
@OStr Well, if this isn't the place to have official answers, can you tell me the right place? Is there somewhere? Since we LGs do this for free, and I'm sure GM makes a lot of profit from it, why can't someone give us official data? It's something I don't understand.
I really don't know. Maybe the product forums is a better place for interacting directly with GMaps staff.
@OStr Well, if this isn't the place to have official answers, can you tell me the right place? Is there somewhere? Since we LGs do this for free, and I'm sure GM makes a lot of profit from it, why can't someone give us official data? It's something I don't understand.
I really don't know. Maybe the product forums is a better place for interacting directly with GMaps staff.
One of the responses on the Maps product forums are as follows:
"I am surprised that you were directed to this forum, the Google employees that can assist you with this matter are the Local Guides employees, that participate in that forum. We currently only have sporadic assistance from business employees in this forum."
Apart from the Community Specialist, with only a few visits from GMB employees, most Googlers/Google Moderators are here on Local Guides Connect, as it's mainly Top Contributors in those forums, often with varied opinions/strategies for dealing with the same issue.
@Briggs, as I've said, I don't know. Connect Moderators aren't really part of the development team. Some of them may have contacts within the team, while others like to think they do, but are as much in the dark as we are. Just because someone was invited to a Google event and rubbed shoulders with some programmers doesn't mean he now understands the principles behind crowdsourced cartography.
In the end, your experiments with your mother's account provided more useful analysis of the problem than any of the moderators and administrators did.
Who else by show of hands feels the new algorithm is hampering us the local guides in verifying and adding places?
I don't think this is the right question. Remember, GMaps doesn't exist to cater to the editing needs of LGs. It's the other way around: the notion of LGs was created to help build and maintain an up-to-date map.
So a better question would be, does the new algorithm help Google Maps keep its maps correct and updated? Does giving higher trust to edits from Level 1 novices than to experienced editors result in better maps?
My goal is the same as Google's: to improve the maps. To that end, I'm happy to spend much of my free time editing maps. But if GMaps figured out a better way to keep its maps up-to-date, I'll be just as happy spending my free time elsewhere.
2022
