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I just tried making reservations for an anniversary dinner, so I Google "Obstinate Daughter" and they put up a little widget for Resy and lo and behold there ar

I just tried making reservations for an anniversary dinner, so I Google "Obstinate Daughter" and they put up a little widget for Resy and lo and behold there are no good reservations times available despite it being zero-dark-thirty on the first day one could even make reservations for my targeted date. Now I'm a bit skeptical that the city collectively got up at the ass-crack of dawn to make a dinner reservation on a random weeknight, so I go visit the restaurant website and they have a wide open calendar. Had I not scrutinized the Google offerings the restaurant would have lost out on my business. IANAL but that whole offering on the part of Google just seems morally wrong if not some form of fraudulent.

krnlpnc 5y ago
So I wonder what's the end game of a pattern like this? Is it a shakedown type of situation where if a restaurant doesn't pay up to enable some reservations "integration" they will be shown as fully booked by default?
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Google does all kinds of stupid things like this. They constantly change how they interpret data and punish anyone who doesn't (or can't) follow the new rules. They'll suddenly require X to be valid against a specific standard, but the maker of the product you sell doesn't follow X. Oh, and omitting X is the same as having an invalid X. Frankly, it's ridiculous. We have to have an entire paid position just for dealing with Google's bullshit.
zerocrates 5y ago
As far as I see that restaurant just does in fact use Resy and it looks to me like Google just shows the same results the Resy site does. What they do do is just not show you times that are outside a window around the selected time (and they preselect one) so maybe that's the issue? I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.

krnlpnc 5y ago

So I wonder what's the end game of a pattern like this? Is it a shakedown type of situation where if a restaurant doesn't pay up to enable some reservations "integration" they will be shown as fully booked by default?

kayodelycaon 5y ago
Google does all kinds of stupid things like this. They constantly change how they interpret data and punish anyone who doesn't (or can't) follow the new rules. They'll suddenly require X to be valid against a specific standard, but the maker of the product you sell doesn't follow X. Oh, and omitting X is the same as having an invalid X. Frankly, it's ridiculous. We have to have an entire paid position just for dealing with Google's bullshit.

zerocrates 5y ago

As far as I see that restaurant just does in fact use Resy and it looks to me like Google just shows the same results the Resy site does. What they do do is just not show you times that are outside a window around the selected time (and they preselect one) so maybe that's the issue? I'm not really seeing the fraud or moral issue here. Of course the reservation system isn't the same as the ordering one and just the nature of the market makes the reservation services less problematic than the food-ordering ones.