Curious. For a few years I'd have looked to Google Maps / Google Local as one of the great services Google provides (along with gmail, Chat, Android, Chrome and ChromeOS development...) as an argument for how ad-supported Google is a substantial net benefit to society and against any antitrust or punitive government action. Call the legitimacy of the maps data into question and another pillar of the empire begins to crumble - not directly from any misdeed of Google, just a naive (or not..) reliance on algorithms and crowd-sourcing and inability to deal with the flood deliberate/malicious gaming of their systems by third parties.<p>A minor tragedy of the past 15 years of social networking is it feels like we're reaching the end of that era and, despite every opportunity for better or worse (e.g. Facebook's real name policy), we've emerged with no useful reputation system or web of trust to stem the tide of spam and SEO garbage.