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Re:People think they're calling restaurants directly but Gru... by enumjorge on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @09:27PM (#23398688)
> The redirect number can also appear higher in Google search results (including the Google panel for that business) than the restaurant’s own line.

This seems like a pretty fundamental failure on Google's part. The whole value proposition of Google is that they'll find you the best answer for you search, not just 'an' answer that could be misinformation. This is the problem with the way their ranking algorithms tend to favor information aggregators. It's easy for second-hand sites to out-rank the source of truth. It reminds me of the way Pinterest has degraded the Google image search experience by polluting the results with their own low-quality entries.

Now I get that automating the gathering of this information must not be easy. How do you verify the legitimacy of any one page claiming to be the site for a restaurant? What I don't understand is how Google can see that sites like Grubhub are exploiting the ranking algorithm to re-route users, but they don't do anything about it. Why don't they penalize those sites?

Re:People think they're calling restaurants directly but Gru... by Wingman4l7 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @12:07AM (#23399559)
IIRC, this was also an issue during the 2018 cryptocurrency rush -- fraudulent support phone #s for big exchanges / companies like Coinbase would show up higher in the rankings than the legitimate number. Frustratingly and amusingly, the fraudulent phone numbers were supposedly better-staffed and more responsive.
Re:People think they're calling restaurants directly but Gru... by VMisTheWay on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @07:47AM (#23402339)
Because fraudulent people don't actually provide value, where coinbase needs to confirm identity.