Spam and Advertisements Infiltrating Google Maps

I use Google Maps a lot and for the most part it is pretty good, but one issue I have with it lately is the amount of spam that is popping up on the maps. Often when you zoom in you will see what looks like the name of a business but if you look closer you will notice it is placed on a residential house. Dig into the details more and you will often find that the business is not actually located there and may not even have a location at all.

It seems many people are just using Google Maps as a free way to advertise their business. They will put a link to their website in some random place hoping to get more traffic and attention for their business. This is a problem because these links are cluttering the maps with useless information. Businesses that have no physical store location should not be posting on Google Maps. It is not a free advertising service.

You can report these posts but in my experience reporting them does not do much and I still see the same listings on the maps long after they have been reported. Google really needs to do something about this issue.

It seems anyone with a Google account and put whatever they want on the map. Google needs to start verifying this stuff better before publishing it to the world. They need to find a way to distinguish businesses from houses and areas on the map where nothing even exists.

I know some people may have a home based business and for those, I might give an exception if they use their home address as their business address. For the other cases where people are just posting links to their business in places that have nothing to do with their business it is not ok and these listings should be removed.

People at Google, please look into this before Google Maps becomes just a mess of random spam and advertisements.

People who take shopping carts off the property and abandon them

One of my pet peeves is when people take shopping carts far beyond the store property limits and then abandon them wherever they feel like it. You may see this sometimes in the nearby areas around grocery stores.

It seems as though some people who do not have a car will load their groceries into a cart and then wheel it over to where they live so they do not have to carry all the groceries by hand. While I don't really think this is acceptable and there are probably other better solutions available, I would excuse this under one condition and that is that they return the cart when they are done with it!

It is bad enough people are taking carts off the property away from stores, but then to just abandon the cart in the middle of nowhere is completely unacceptable. Who do they think is going to collect the cart from there? It is going to stay wherever it was left for weeks, maybe even months until someone decides to do something about it.

Maybe a good samaritan will take the time to wheel it back or maybe eventually someone from store management will arrange to have the cart picked up and brought back to the store. But really the person who originally took it should bring it back.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Feel free to leave a comment below.