https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58 (0:58 through 4:20)

it's terrible but a lot of people [0] think digital information, and thus internet, is truth

[0] and if google itself falls for this.. no wonder if people do too

Sarcasm aside, how do we propose they determine what is truth? If we assume the internet is full of information and more truthful than not, then Google’s assumption could be accurate. Of course they do try and solve this with the knowledge graph and expert curation. Connections to verified information might give validity to that information, but not always.

Google has been transitioning to attempting to provide a "truth engine" for several years. Whenever I try a complex key-word search, it suggests a question format for it (often with worse result but sometimes OK). When I have finally got the key words down to filter just what I want, google whines about "Not very many results, here's what you should do..." and, of course, Google often gives explicit answers for questions in it's search results (a notable percentage of which are wrong as noted).

And Google being half-assed truth engine is all sorts of bad...

The problem is in the presentation: Google's tools in general, not limited to search, present themselves as though they can identify truth. That's the flaw, the lie, if you prefer.

Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the same one that dictates what appears in Google Maps for claimed businesses), so if the owners are updating their website but not updating that (or checking their email for emails from google that say '[business], are you open on 4th of July?') it'll show incorrect info.

This is the problem with the web search and scaping provider also trying to be a thousand other services at the same time. It's a constant conflict of interest.

Huh? If the business owners aren't updating the correct info in My Business, how can that possibly be Google's fault?

Google is a company that sells space for ads; an “advertising company” conventionally refers to a company that designs ad campaigns and purchases ad space for them on behalf of a client.

> not a search engine.

No, its both. Just as historically newspapers publishers in the US have been both producers of newspapers and companies that sell ad space.

If Google is scraping this information and keeping it separate, unlinked and un-updated from its source of truth, how is that anyone but Google's fault?

Once you claim your business location, most submitted changes should come to you for review. (There may be exceptions, I'm not an expert here)

Unwanted by whom? The reader? If you don't want google as an intermediary you can just... not use them. If you want to search but not have an intermediary, you can just run your own search engine and index. The publisher? Again, if a publisher doesn't want an search engine to be an intermediary then they can always get their site delisted. Turns out that most sites don't do that, or do and then quickly revert back, so clearly they want Google as an intermediary.

As the old adage goes. The only thing worse than no documentation is outdated/incorrect documentation.

Opening hours and Google Maps are the only things that get me on Google from DuckDuckGo these days (even if Google Maps keeps getting worse every year).