I totally agree that the data collection and aggregation capabilities of Google are a boon to society as a whole.

A wise friend of mine said, and I’m paraphrasing, “you can’t trust markets to self correct”. In other words, as soon as a system has the opportunity to be economically beneficial to someone, someone is going to behave opportunistically.

So, to the extent that the boon doesn’t intersect with bad behavior it’s great. When they do, map spam

I see a fundamental difference between a wiki edit of a business listing and an edit in Map Maker. The data collected in Map Maker is a valuable basis for creating maps in areas of the world where none exist. There is little motivation to cheat like in the business listing and more incentive to get it right (future safety). The data can also be triangulated against satellite data, gps data and use input to come up with a reasonably correct map.

Mike

It’s very instructive to hear from Matt on this topic in particular. I know his role is web spam in general, but clearly he’s got a voice in the community and at Google.

And obviously from his most pointed examples he’s looking at the problem with his spam colored glasses on.

The challenge of the wiki style editorial (so easily abused by you and Danny) is that the wisdom of crowds requires a crowd. With small businesses there is no crowd, there are only a few references and it doesn’t take long for the impact to be felt decidedly (as in your Denver Flowers example).

Perhaps it’s my personal bent, but often see “do no evil’ as “power to the people” and clearly the challenge of so large a dataset is “the people” don’t have enough power to move the needle. But when it moves it can have a powerfully negative impact.

Will