Local Guide (Premium)

I’m active on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. But I use another service to reach many more people than I do via all those services combined. That’s right. I’m a local guide on Google Maps.

I know. That may seem like an odd thing for me to be doing. But it comes from a good place, and I get some useful and rewarding feedback, both from Google and from the merchants I frequent. We all want to believe that we’re making a difference in some small way. And … this is one way.

I don’t recall when this started, exactly. But looking through my contributions, I see that my first review, for Rattle N Hum East in New York City, is now 7 years old. And that my first photo contribution, from café in Paris, is about the same age. Those early reviews were not particularly wordy, but I’ve always been more interested in the photos. (I just don’t like typing in a lot of text on my phone.)

So far, I’ve made over 3800 contributions to Google Maps in the form of 155 reviews, 163 ratings, 2437 photos, over 1000 answers, and 55 edits. If anything, I don’t contribute enough, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited the same restaurant again and again and never bothered to leave even a short review or post some photos. But despite this, my photos have been viewed almost 40 million times on Google Maps.

Right. 2400 photos. Viewed 40 million times. Incredible.

I have three photos that were viewed over 1 million times each, though two of them, oddly, are outside shots of restaurants.

From a review perspective, which again is my weak link, I’m somehow ranked in the top 10 percent of restaurant reviewers overall on Google. I’m also ranked in the top 10 percent of American restaurant reviewers and in the top 10 percent of Japanese restaurant reviewers on Google.

A couple of stories from our time here in Pennsylvania can help explain why I bother.

When we first moved here in August 2017, we were on a tight schedule for a variety of reasons, and our son Mark only had a few days here with his car before he needed to take it back to his college in New York. We were able to get him the PA license plate and registration, but we needed to get it inspected. In Massachusetts, this was easy: you could drive up to a gas station that did state inspections and do it on the spot, with the whole process possibly taking 10 minutes.

In PA, not so much: We drove around together, getting rejected at each inspection place and being told that we’d need to make an appointment that was always several days out. But we only had until the next day. We couldn’t find one of these places and had parked perpendicular to the street we were on and were both looking at Google Maps on our phones to try and find it. For whatever reason, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that the place we were looking for was across the street. “I found it,” I announced. It was called Safari Automotive.

We crossed the street and spoke with the owner, Ali, and I explained our predicament: Mark needed to get his car inspected quickly because he was starting another year of school, and we had literally just arrived in the area a few days earlier. Ali looked at Mark and said, “What are you studying? Are you doing well in school?” Mark answered him and Ali agreed to take his car and turn it around later that day. How nice.

After that, we took our other two cars to Safari to be inspected too, and we got to know Ali over time as each of the vehicles was always due for some service milestone or having some issue. So I wrote a short review on Google Maps, five stars. Ali wrote a nice response (that was much longer than my review) but, more importantly to me, he told me several times about how much that review had helped, how new customers had cited it when they visited for the first time. I was thrilled with this: Ali is an incredible human being, and his business really is top-notch. We’ve gone back again and again.

A less positive interaction.

A few years ago, we were looking to put a fence between us and the neighbors behind us. They’re old—in their 80s—and while they never spent even a day in their backyard the entire time we were there, they installed these incredibly bright LED spotlights back there to protect them from the crimes that never once occurred anywhere in that neighborhood the entire time we (or they) were there. Whatever.

My wife and I unsuccessfully spent a few weekends in a row using Google Maps to try and find a local fence company. We literally drove to several locations each of those weekends, and every single time, it wasn’t a business but was instead someone’s house. Finally, it dawned on us: local businesses were making themselves seem bigger by putting each owner’s and employee’s residences in Google Maps too. The assumption, I guess, was that most people would call or use the website. But that’s not what Google Maps is for, primarily. It’s for navigation. And those addresses were all bogus.

This caused me to investigate what one could do. And what one can do is bring up these locations in Google Maps, click “Suggest an edit,” and then select “Close or remove.” And among the reasons for doing this is the one that was applicable to us, “Not open to the public.” So I “closed” every single one of those fake businesses. And then, because I was on Maps and could see all kinds of fake businesses locally on the map, including such things as “Todd’s childhood home,” I closed them too.

I’m not sure if my status as a local guide has any bearing on Google taking these suggestions seriously. But I do know that I have never failed and that all of them were closed. Indeed, many times, Google emailed me to thank me for the help.

And then I ran into a problem with a neighbor on the next street over. She owns a business in New Jersey and, like those “fence companies,” had decided to list her home on Maps as being a location for that business. Which it is not. I think because it was my own neighborhood, I stupidly chose to leave a review first, since I had actually been there and literally knew it was not a business. (And couldn’t be, legally, based on our HOA.) This review included a photo of the house with the text, “As you can see, this is not a business.” But I later just suggested an edit and Google finally closed it.

She was not amused. One day, when I drove home from the gym, I saw our neighbor across the street talking to a woman I didn’t recognize, and as I pulled in, I could see fingers pointing and my neighbor—but not that woman—walking up my driveway. Here we go.

“My dear friend here tells me that someone named Paul Thurrott closed her business on Google Maps.”

“I’m going to stop you right there,” I responded. “I’m not sure that she’s your friend or not, but that woman was committing fraud on Google Maps, and I reported it because people cannot drive up to her home and conduct business there. And if she wants to complain about that, she can do it herself, or she can take it up with Google. Which, I suspect, she has. And she’s in the wrong.”

And then I excused myself and went inside. And that business is still not on Google Maps. Because it’s not a business.

Semi-related, Google this past week wrote a post we almost covered, but didn’t, about how it’s using AI to tackle fake contributions on Google Maps. That’s good. But what I wish Google would also do is tackle fake businesses: people get in their cars and drive to a place only to discover it’s a townhouse with children playing outside and not a fence company or whatever. This should be easy to prevent.

Meanwhile, my contributions to Maps, long and involved or not, are all real. And, I hope, helpful.