That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault. Making it sound like the business's fault for not using Google's other service is just reinforcing the idea that Google's information is the only information that's real.

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.

In the hypothetical example, they are providing wrong information to Google. If they provided no information, it would be a different story.

> That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault.

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

Because this means My Business is not fit for purpose. Google is a web search engine, not a Google proprietary DB search engine.

Google is an advertising company.. not a search engine

> Google is an advertising company

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.

Google the company is an ad intermediary company. Google is also the colloquial name of Google Search.

Just because Google scrapes my website once to seed their database doesn't make me responsible for being their data monkey to keep it updated.

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?

You have to register your business page. It's not automatic. I believe op here meant a Google business listing which was created by the owner explicitly, but not updated.

It's not? Interesting. Literally hundreds of business listings popped up in Google Maps overnight, a few months ago, which appear very much scraped out of some registry - name, category, address, nothing else. Similarly with the """"place names"""" that seem to be based on people's personal remarks, and about as inaccurate.

Google map entries are connected to, but not the same as business entries. https://www.google.com.au/business/

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)

If this were the case then one would expect Google to be paying businesses for up-to-date information with a contractual SLA.

Even if 90% of businesses play along (doing Google's data entry work for them), the 10% chance of my wasting half an hour makes it worth ignoring the info box and double-checking each time.

It has also been a waste of working hours at our offices. I work at libraries and am responsible for the communication towards visitors — we are slowly opening up all our venues again with lifting of corona measures, which mean we need to update our opening times. With one click I can reverse them on our own website but I have to update every location manually on google results. Anyone can also change these opening times plus they might just change them again based on some third party website that scrapes outdated opening times.

I don’t know what the prioritization is if you are e.g. explicitly registered in some Google database, but I’ve had a good experience with just marking up the opening hours (addresses, etc.) with RDFa (or Microformats or whatever else Google accepts these days) on the official website. Of course how easy it is depends on the number of layers between you and the actual HTML, and my case was rather straightforward (three locations with separately listed addresses and opening hours), but you might want to check if it’ll take some of the pain out of the process.

Google recently changed the hours of operation on my business' Google My Business listing to an hour later than I had it set to. I have no idea why; I certainly didn't tell them to. We found out when we got some angry calls from customers who showed up after we were closed. It's hard to explain to someone that we don't own our own listing on Google, and that we're at their mercy to approve the changes we submit and hope they don't make their own arbitrary updates.

Are you saying you've claimed your listing, meaning Google has set you as the owner, and it was still possible for some rando to make changes?

Or that some runaway automated internal process is treated as more authoritative than the owner, or...