[LINK] When Google is wrong (was Google malware label)

[Paul Bolger]

Google's data acquisition systems may be good, but its error
correction still needs a bit of work.

A couple of years ago I worked for the Alice Springs Town Council,
running their website. While working on adding Google maps to various
parts of the site I noticed that Google had placed a "Todd Mall
Medical Centre" on top of the Central Australian Tourist Industry
Association building. There is no "Todd Mall Medical Centre" (there is
a "Mall Medical Centre", but it's about 200m north), and there has
never been any sort of medical practise where Google has sited this
one - the whole block belongs to the council.

So I tried, over about six months, to get this corrected. I emailed,
commented in Gmaps developer blogs, registered the council building as
a business in the Google business listings. Two years later the error
is still there.

Has anyone else had any success in correcting Google?




2009/2/3 Jan Whitaker <jwhit at melbpc.org.au>:
> At 03:08 AM 3/02/2009, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>>A recent thread at Google Webmaster Help says,
>>
>>"Webmasters are eager to have a Google malware label removed from their
>>site and often ask how long a review of the site will take. Both the
>>original scanning and the review process are fully automated. The systems
>>analyze large portions of the internet, which is big place, so the review
>>may not happen immediately. Ideally, the label will be removed within a
>>few hours. At its longest, the process should take a day or so."
>
> Rubbish.
>
> A friend in our web design sig had this problem with his website for
> the Scouts and it took months for it to go away. He had done nothing
> that was malware at all himself. There *may* have been something
> added by a cracker that he couldn't see/find, but eventually it did
> clear, again I think without him doing anything. It was all a mystery.
>
> Jan
>
>
>
> Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
> jwhit at janwhitaker.com
> business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
> personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
> blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
>
> Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or
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> ~Madeline L'Engle, writer
>
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> guests. - JW, May, 2007
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