In mid-August, Jason Rule learned some surprising news about the coffee shop he owns and operates in Hays—the place had closed for good.
Not in the real world, where it is thriving. Coffee Rules Lounge was listed for a few days as ‘permanently closed’ on Google Maps. During that time, anyone searching for a latte on a smartphone, for instance, would have assumed the store was a goner.
“We’re not far from Interstate 70,” said Rule, “and I have no doubt that a lot of people running up and down that highway just skipped us.”
In recent months, plenty of perfectly healthy businesses across the country have expired—sometimes for hours, other times for weeks— though only in the online realm catalogued and curated by Google. The reason is that it is surprisingly easy to report a business as closed in Google Places, the search giant’s version of the local Yellow Pages.
On Google Places, a typical listing has the address of a business, a description provided by the owner and links to photos, reviews and Google Maps. It also has a section titled “Report a problem” and one of the problems to report is “this place is permanently closed.” If enough users click it, the business is labelled “reportedly closed” and later, pending a review by Google, “permanently closed.” Google was tight-lipped about its review methods and would not discuss these.
Google’s rivals, like Bing and Yahoo, have versions of Places and these let users report a business as closed. But neither has anything close to Google’s traffic, which means they are the scene of far less mischief.
When Google created Places, it had an eminently sensible type of crowd-sourcing in mind. The site contains millions of listings, and when owners close without updating their profile, the job falls to customers to keep information current. But like any open system, this one can be abused. Search engine consultants say that “closing” a business on Google has become an increasingly common tactic among unscrupulous competitors.
“I’d say it was in June that we started to see a big uptick in complaints about this in online forums,” said Linda Buquet of Catalyst eMarketing in San Marcos, Calif. “It might be that a number of consultants are now offering services like ‘nuke your competitor’ in Google Places. But it could just be a competitor, acting alone.”
Nobody is quite sure how prevalent these sham closings have become. In Google Forums, where users can pose questions about Google’s features, there are dozens of exasperated postings like this one, written in July: “Help! My business is listed ‘PERMANENTLY CLOSED’ on Google Maps even though it has always been open! Help!”
But this, most likely, represents a fraction of viable businesses that have been cyberpadlocked. Many owners, search consultants say, have no idea that they’ve been shuttered online, and many others fix the problem without asking anyone how to solve it.
A Google spokesman, Gabriel Stricker, declined to comment on whether the company kept a running tally of fraudulent closings. But he said Google was aware of the issue and was already working on changes, which will be adopted in coming days, to prevent what he called “malicious or incorrect labelling.”
“We know that accurate listings on Google Maps are an important tool for many business owners,” he wrote in an e-mail.
“We take reports of spam and abuse very seriously and do our best to ensure the accuracy of a listing before updating it.”
If there is a historical antecedent to ‘closing’ a company on Google, it is a dirty trick that was fairly common in 19th-century politics, wherein supporters of a candidate would spread rumours that his opponent was dead. This didn’t always work — Thomas Jefferson prevailed in the election of 1800, despite reports of his demise — but the internet corollary can have terrible consequences.
