Lost access to my business on Google infra / services after leaving a positive review on a bakery while on holiday to Paris - for "violating Google Maps policy".

This reminds me of how people self censure their real opinions in authoritarian regimes. It creates a climate against creativity and innovation, bringing the system down in the long term.

But it's really your own fault for not having high reaching contacts into Google's upper tier!

i do not know what policy specifically could lead to a ban due to a use of map reviews while traveling internationally but at this point this is what many of us have come to expect from google as a matter of course.

Given some recent discussions, I found this excerpt amusing:

"... supercharge their websites and mobile apps with Google-quality search. Built on Google’s technologies that understand user intent and context, the solution helps businesses improve the search and overall shopping experience across all of their digital touchpoints."

*My choice of posts to read may be (strongly) biased towards those moving away from Google.

People aren't quitting in droves, and the company isn't on the edge of failure, as regular readers might believe.

Google's business is Google's success, not your success.

- Adsense as an advertising option makes complete sense. Adsense as your sole source of customer growth is asking for trouble.

- Stay the !@#$% away from Google Workspace, if you're counting on business continuity. It's fine for low-stakes use (e.g. students in a school, where there is no long-term continuity).

- GCE is fine as an option if you have a generic dev-ops infrastructure where you just need cloud servers, and where you can move to AWS or Azure in a blink. Relying on Google Cloud proprietary services is asking for trouble.

- Android App Store is fine for a quick buck, or as a supplement to a core business. Think long and hard before building a business around it, though.

... and so on.

Google Search as a product is declining in usefulness due to a very silly decision to no longer support lexical queries(!) They've built a broken AI fad that delivers nothing but song lyrics and shopping results to long tail queries. The core product is rotting and no one is empowered to fix it.

I cannot understand how they actively got so much worse over a few years. Especially since they don't suffer the Spam/SEO issues they have in Search.

There might also be some selection bias here since "escalating Google issues to HN" has become a thing. Complaining about Google is popular on HN, for good or bad. Yet, they grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves. It's quite possible customers of other companies just don't escalate to HN (yet).

(Said as a former Google employee.)

They grow revenue, so they aren't losing customers in droves, yet.

This seems a useful service. Yes, use it for your business benefit, but just understand that the psychopath may turn any time, and plan your business contingencies accordingly.