Yeah. Retailers were trying to capture leverage from google by implementing good local search, google tested the waters to see if it could push back and found that the answer was "no," not necessarily because their customers started whining, but because they had somebody use the new data to do a calculation that demonstrated that their customers actually were willing to talk back with their wallets.

This experiment wasn't a mistake and no amount of diversity or cultural sensitivity training would have been sufficient to let them jump from question to conclusion without the experiment. But when all you have is a hammer...