Google Map Maker Suspended

You may have seen some events in recent history involving hacking into Google map maker and as your Sarasota SEO company, we felt the need to let you know about it! Although some of these may have gotten a few chuckles, the reality is that Google never intended for their edit-friendly map feature to become the pit of a joke, but rather something useful for users. With the pranks escalating (think back not too long ago to the Android logo reliving itself on Apple), it was time for Google to make a necessary change.  

So, why is Google Map Maker down indefinitely, you ask?

The answer is quite simple. Average users were using the feature for something much more fraudulent than it was ever intended to be used for, leaving the rest of us who used the edit option for necessary & helpful advice high and dry.

Now when you visit the Google Map Maker page, you will be greeted with a message:

“Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing starting May 12, 2015. We are terribly sorry for the interruption this outage might cause to your mapping projects. Please bear with us and plan your activities suitably.”

Further, the message links to a more descriptive message from Pavithra Kanakarajan and the Google Map Maker team that reads:

“As some of you know already, we have been experiencing escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months. The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate – a strong user in our community chose to go and create a large scale prank on the Map. As a consequence, we suspended auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, till we figured out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.

All of our edits are currently going through a manual review process.

We have been analyzing the problem and have made several changes. However, it is becoming clear that fixing some of this is actually going to take longer than a few days. As you can imagine, turning automated and user moderation off has the direct implication of very large backlogs of edits requiring manual review. This in turn means your edits will take a long time to get published.

Given the current state of the system, we have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to any of our users to let them continue to spend time editing. Every edit you make is essentially going to a backlog that is growing very fast. We believe that it is more fair to only say that if we do not have the capacity to review edits at roughly the rate they come in, we have to take a pause.

We have hence decided to temporarily disable editing across all countries starting Tuesday, May 12, 2015, till we have our moderation system back in action. This will be a temporary situation and one that we hope to come out of as soon as possible. While this is a very difficult, short term decision, we think this will help us get to a better state faster. More importantly, we believe it is simply the right thing to do to all of you, our valued users who continue to edit with the hope that your changes might go live as fast as you’ve been used to.”

     

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