Does the article actually thoroughly discredit its own title? People don't write anymore.

Writers rarely get to choose their own headlines. That's why it's quite common to find completely reasonable articles with extremely sensational headlines.

The article didn't discredit anything. The title is "How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will" not "How Google Map Hackers Destroyed Serbian Crown".

But the article didn't support the title. The title supported by the article could be "How Google Map Hackers Can Contribute To The Demise Of The Restaurant On A Downhill Trajectory". This is just one sensationalist title.

Why so much hate on the headline? The article itself is perfectly reasonable, so just read and digest that. It sounds like you want to just read the title and understand everything.

I used to be a copy editor, back in the day when newspapers had copy editors. One of the jobs of a copy editor back then was to write the headline, and write an accurate one. My chief editor was tough on me, too, and it was hard to come up with a good headline that fit the space and was accurate. She often changed just one word or tense and cleared things up, but now and then she'd can my headline entirely and rewrite it.

Today? Online news sites don't care about headline accuracy, just SEO and linkbait rating. They don't even really have to care about length, to an extent. "Subject That Will Blow Your Mind and Change the Way You See the World. Top All-time. You Won’t Believe Your Eyes. Watch."

So yes, headlines have gotten useless.

The only reason I look at a headline anymore for is to see what the topic is. They're not useless for that.

Isn't the topic in this case supposedly "How Google Maps can Destroy a Business at Will"? A topic that isn't supported by the article content (as discussed upthread)? That seems pretty "useless" to me.

The topic is how local business is affected by Internet technologies. The given title conveys that perfectly well, at least to me.

Because people get sick of misleading page titles. It is obvious that the title was chosen just to get you to the page. However, the implication of the title is that Google destroyed this business by listing its hours incorrectly. I agree with vdaniuk, the article does not support the title assigned to it. There is substantial evidence to support the position that the restaurant died for reasons other than the incorrect listing of hours.

I realize people choose page titles that are meant to grab your attention, and I don't have a problem with that in general. It just gets tiresome when the article does not discuss what you were led to believe it was going to discuss.

So where's the evidence that Google Map Hackers Can Destroy A Business at Will? I can't find it in the article. Certainly the article lists a few tactics that have worked in the past, a few loopholes that have been closed, but all of these appear to, at worst, provide temporary inconveniences.