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> the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer it sounds like there needed to be (needs to be?) tooling to allow customer support to
by thayne 6y ago
> the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer
it sounds like there needed to be (needs to be?) tooling to allow customer support to make these changes. Fixing these kinds of things really shouldn't be something that engineers should have to do manually.
- IggleSniggle 6y agoThere is no customer support for products like this because there is no customer. Not in that way, anyway.
- jdm2212 6y agoThere are various ways for businesses to tell Google stuff -- structured data on their website, working with aggregators, Google My Business, etc. The problem is that (a) business can mistakenly enter wrong data (b) businesses can lie (c) businesses can fail to enter any data (d) businesses can fail to update data. Google can't let any random idiot with a smartphone edit Google Maps, and they also can't let any random idiot waste a potentially unlimited amount of customer support time on what might well be an erroneous change. So they came up with a thing where you can edit Maps but the edits only apply if some conditions that can be automatically checked are satisfied (recency, user edit quality track record, agreement among users, stuff like that). But building and validating that was a big project spanning quite a few teams and several months. The opportunity cost often isn't worth it for that (I don't know whether it was in this instance, either... but it is really cool IMO.)