r/LocalGuides

I understand schools can receive fake or abusive reviews, but other important institutions face that too. Wouldn’t better moderation make more sense than removing reviews entirely?

Parents also rely on reviews for safety, bullying concerns, infrastructure, fees structure and overall experiences.

I have a lot of photo contributions so I used a service that takes your local guide profile link and scans your photos and tells you if someone is using your images commercially.

Turns out a company straight up took one of my interior restaurant photos and used it on their business website for marketing. No credit, no permission, nothing.

I emailed them with screenshots, links to the original upload date, and metadata showing it was mine. At first they made excuses, but once I made it clear I was prepared to pursue copyright infringement in the courts for 10k compensation (in reality I was never going to take this to court) they settled for $900.

You don’t have to turn a blind eye or beg for a credit or cry to google to get it removed – it’s your legal right to demand compensation.  

Hi,

As Google local guides, what is your opinion about TripAdvisor (reliability and rating system).

I personally stopped using it many years ago and fully "switched to" maps as my source to obtain insights of restaurants, etc (and to rate) but I have two points which makes me think TripAdvisor, is not that bad, being I) the points seem to be more accurate (e.g. less fake reviews/bots), ii) negative (factual) reviews are not removed simply because of a claim if "defamation".

I just like the whole Google environment with Google maps which makes the rating and guide system in Google so useful for me.

Looking forward to hesr your thoughts.

So yeah, I've been a contributor. Sometimes I add businesses to help them and sometimes I do my apartments where I rent so that it's easier to commute with cabs.

So now just moved into a new place this month. I found the apartment on maps and pinned the building, the owner is furious as she assumes I marked is as an owner. Now I can't explain anything to her because yes old orthodox people are just rigid.

Help me remove it, I tried the edit and place doesn't exist here. Been two days and it's still pending.

Just want to know if that would get deleted or could I maybe mark it as moved address and pin it to my old apartment. I just want this place to be marked off

Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice from anyone who understands how Google Maps handles new place submissions, especially in regions with border or territorial disputes.

I live in Guyana, and for almost two years now, every attempt I make to add a new place in Essequibo gets automatically rejected. This happens even when the place is real, active, and easy to verify.

Essequibo is currently part of a territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, and I’m wondering if that may be affecting how Google Maps reviews edits in the area. I don’t want to turn this into a political post, but the issue is making it very difficult for people here to add legitimate businesses, public locations, and places of interest.

We have many new businesses and community locations that should be on Google Maps. I’ve tried adding proper names, categories, phone numbers, photos, and accurate map pins. In some cases, we even asked the actual business owners to create or claim their own listings, but those also get rejected.

The rejection usually happens no matter what we do, so it feels like there may be some kind of automatic restriction or review problem affecting the area. Even If we add the poster of the business, fill out every detail that we can including the lot number for the address, photos of the place without stripping any of the metadata for the images. It's still rejected.

Has anyone experienced something similar in a disputed region or low map coverage area? Is there a better way to escalate this to Google Maps or Local Guides support? Would posting on Local Guides Connect help, or is there another method for getting legitimate places reviewed manually?

Any advice would be appreciated, especially from Local Guides or people who have dealt with repeated automatic rejections.

Other notes: My account is level 7, I've been contributing for maybe close to 8 years now.

Also, Where I'm from, being third world country... people here aren't technically oriented. So getting people to help with contributions isn't an easy task, you'll find majority of the places added are just a handful of names.

So I was looking through Google Maps when deciding where to take my mom for mother's day and I wanted to search for a particular dish from the photos. You don't have a search function when you're in the photos album on a place Google Page. I think that would be a nice feature to have, what other features would you like to see?