> It's a hard problem to solve - there's money from 3rd parties to be made from spamming the maps. It's in Google's best interest to try and protect the end use

> It's a hard problem to solve - there's money from 3rd parties to be made from spamming the maps. It's in Google's best interest to try and protect the end user from fakes. A cynic would say it is being treated as an optimization problem from the perspective of maximizing revenue: If we have the number of users switching away from Maps as a function of fake listings and fake listing up-bidding is allowed, how many blatantly fake listings (not even borderline cases) per query can we allow to maximize revenue before the costs of users switching away outweighs the gain from fake listings? More transparency in the process for removing fake listings would be nice to alleviate the concern that this is what Google is doing.