@Maurice
As you know, I have explored that question for a long time.

The short is answer that they are savvy and could solve the problem but choose not to do so.

The long answer…

There are 88,110 employees at Google. Roughly half of which are engineers from the top institutions in the world. So on one level they are savvy.

But, and this is a big but, they have a corporate culture that is inculcated with certain values that prevent them from wanting to solve certain problems or perhaps incapable of doing so.

As you saw in their spam research paper, they view the problem from one of scale and relevance. This effectively blinds them to the hyper local reality on the ground. The algo is god and that puts the damper on putting real, trained humans on the task.

Another issue within Google is their cost accounting. Maps and organic search are surely responsible for the massive income of Adwords and yet Maps is seen as a “free” product and thus any infrastructure and engineering time used for the purpose of spam abatement is viewed as an above the line, gross profit impacting, variable expense rather than an investment in the company.

The corporate culture also has two values that impact these outcomes… projects and products are an outcome of small teams with full, independent control AND the desire for these team members to move to different divisions and gain more experience on a regular basis. Within that is the ethos of build quick, release early and reiterate until it’s proved to be useful or a failure and then cut the cord.

The former means that the Maps team comes up with something like Q & A and forget to tell the GMB team about it. That pro

The latter means that if there were someone that was interested in say review spam they were quickly encouraged to move onto another team in another division.

This ethos means that 1)bugs are part of the landscape, 2)it might be updated soon in some sense but 3) that it might very well be cut from herd before the market even knows the product exists.

To a large extent crap on the map is the perfect example of the type of problem that Google COULD solve but chooses NOT to solve for both individual AND corporate reasons.

What is obvious to us, is perceived as a gnat on the butt of an elephant by the Google Gods. Only rarely does the sting of the gnat generate enough pain that someone looks up and says oh, maybe there is a problem… take down that specific spammer so the gnat goes away.

All of this exists within a context of Google success at generating a profit and becoming a monopoly. From a corporate point of view, if not ours, they are doing something right to be that profitable. Their status of being a super aggregator monopolist means that they can create these problems but as long as the problems have no material economic impact, they can ignore them.

I, being ever hopeful, have encouraged, embraced and highlighted other gnats in the hope that a swarm can both identify more problems with the product AND garner more of Google’s ADD rattled attention.

Its been a long slog. And it has become clear during that journey that Google has made an active decision to not solve this problem any more than they already have, IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT.

But Google, as the hegemony, is a context creator, The final outcome may end up being something like Local Services Ads, where the monopolist creates a new market from which they profit by putting trust back into the broken system they created. Ironic eh?