In other words in the old phone book days, imagine if you were to list your business in the phone book but next to your business was a competitors phone number so they get all your business...you put the phone book on notice and they just say sorry we have no duty to provide accurate information.

Many have said get a lawyer to send a letter...that’s a waste of time while you will continue to be damaged. Get a lawyer to file a small claims case for damages and injunction. A few benefits: 1) you could probably get a lawyer to do it on contingency (no out of pocket expenses for you, they would get a % of damages if and only if they win); 2) small claims cases can often fly under the radar of big companies and so maybe as soon as 20 days after filing you get a default judgment; 3) if the do respond a small claims case means 1 thing to them, their attorney’s fees will exceed your damages so they will probably look into it and resolve it; 4) if they want to fight it (which would be stupid if your claims are legit) small claims are extremely expedited, typically there is no formal discovery and it’s just a pretrial (where the parties will be encouraged to settle) and then a trial (possibly a mandatory mediation at pretrial or at the court on the day of the trial).

Consider small claims handle most evictions, your impression would be right an eviction isn’t an “injunction”, but what is an eviction in practice if not an enjoining the tenant from continued possession and an order to vacate a property.

This case might just seek relief in the form of a monetary judgement In the complaint, but in practice what is that judgement but an injunction/order for google to stop any continued act causing damages.

As I noted at pretrial the parties are encouraged by the court to settle and usually at pretrial/trail the parties do a mandatory mediation (again that is jurisdictional but either way statistically Over 90% of cases will settle). In practice these settlement agreements will typically reflect additional terms such as agreement to stop engaging in X or otherwise continuing any act that damages the party as outlined in the complaint, and terms denying admission for any of the claims as outlined in the complaint.

In practice image it playing out where the damaged party here gets an award for monetary damages against google and Google pays but they allow the impersonating “business” on google maps to continue to Impersonate the the damaged party by associating the website/marks with the impersonating business. Google may play the nameless, faceless corporation with no decision makers, but to don’t let them fool you. I personally imagine this thread hitting the front page Here gets google to do something.

This is based on interacting with a couple dozen people though, so it is a small sample size.

Will stop people from contacting them in favour of real businesses if that's the case.

It's 100% within his rights as the website owner, and it will highly encourage those who can change this to do so.

I love it.

I respect the opinion though, so not down-voting you.

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Preferably one that won't hurt a young kid that accidentally clicks on it I presume?

That business can potentially claim damages.

You can definitely report false information on a listing, so I don't understand how they'd tell you "We don't care if the business is using your website name."

You could suggest an edit that removes your website from that place: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7084895

Or even better, report that the place doesn't exist in the first place. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3094088?co=GENIE.Plat...

The answer from the Google support I'm referring to in my post, is from a legal request I've sent to them.

This is the full response in Italian (this is the reason why I didn't attach it to the post):

    Gentile Sig.

    La ringraziamo per il suo messaggio.

    Le facciamo presente che Google è un fornitore di informazioni, non un mediatore. Forniamo informazioni su luoghi, attività commerciali e altre informazioni relative ad una particolare parola di ricerca di ricerca, ma non rivendichiamo alcun diritto sulle etichette associate a tali contenuti. Per ulteriori informazioni, la invitiamo a consultare i nostri Termini di servizio all'indirizzo https://www.google.com/policies/terms/. Per questioni riguardanti il marchio, la preghiamo di rivolgersi direttamente al proprietario della scheda o del luogo in questione. Se il proprietario dei contenuti in questione decide di modificare eventuali informazioni in seguito alla tua richiesta, tale modifica si rifletterà nella scheda la prossima volta che i robot di Google eseguono la scansione del relativo materiale di origine.

    Se ritiene che informazioni personali come il suo numero di telefono vengano visualizzate nei risultati di ricerca relativi a un'attività o a una località, può segnalare il problema tramite Google Maps seguendo le istruzioni riportate in questa pagina: https://support.google.com/business/answer/6163683

    Cordiali saluti,
    Il team di Google

This is google translate:

    We would like to point out that Google is an information provider, not a broker. We provide information about places, businesses, and other information related to a particular search word, but we do not claim any rights on the labels associated with that content. For further information, please consult our Terms of Service at https://www.google.com/policies/terms/. For trademark issues, please contact the owner of the listing or location directly. If the owner of the content in question decides to change any information following your request, this change will be reflected in the tab the next time Google's robots scan its source material.

    If you believe that personal information such as your phone number appears in search results for an activity or location, you can report the problem via Google Maps by following the instructions on this page:

Anyway, as I wrote in another comment the person behind this is either a normal person using his home address or someone working for another company located at that address.

This means that Google has assigned the ownership to him already. I couldn't find any way for requesting the ownership to the entry, but only a "ask the owner access to this entry" page.

Also, a business might exists in that address, but it's certainly not called like my blog.

I thought google didn't really have any customer support or any humans involved in most things. It was all automated systems built by software engineers for the most part.

Pretty sure that's the link your looking for if you want owner's access to the entry.

It probably is your fastest and best path forward.

Google Maps are rubbish. In my experience they don't even show streets in the right place. When you're ordering something you can always write in the "delivery instructions" something like: "Don't use Google; try openstreetmap.org instead." Then, if they turn up an hour late somewhat grumpy: "I did warn you!"

The map editing link / tools have been made much more prominent and accessible over the last year or two. I've moved done streets in my town and the experience was fairly painless.

It's IMHO because no longer can users properly edit maps. It's now only poor crowdsourced+automagical judgement of minor changes.

There's a post office closed for a year or so now that literally can't be removed, Google thinks it's correct and edits get autorejected. It's incredibly stupid.

Another example, recently I tried to connect my blog with google ad-sense ( I bought domain from google and also using g-suite). THis is the response I got,

Some of our services are temporarily experiencing delays during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This means that we’re unable to review your site at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.

Ok I got it. I can understand current situation. But com'n guys at least have courtesy to update me when your services are up. Do you wanna apply me again and again ? If I do, you will mark me as spam. These guys never return a single note on any feedback. What do you want me to do ?

The best advice I can give you, if/when you talk to a real person at Google and they are not helpful, just hang-up and try again until you find someone who can help you.

"This website is not associated with company X which have been misrepresenting themselves by linking to my site from their maps listing."

1. I would need to do that for every referral from google, something which I would avoid.

2. Users might not click on the link and still think we're related.

Also, the very same listing is showing facebook and twitter links on which I cannot do much about.

Trademarks are a bit more complicated as the issue of brand confusion and geographical areas are involved.

But you could always try to contact a lawyer in the area of that company and ask them to write a strong worded letter directly to the business.

Verification of ownership is done via snail mail to the business address.

But I'll defer on that not being an option all the time since it's not my area of expertise.

The easiest thing to do would be to make them want to remove your website. At the top of your main page put a little note saying something like "If you're searching for <foo business> in <location> we're not them. Please click here." Then, since they don't have a website you can send users to a page that explains the situation, suggests that they may want to do business with a more reputable company, and provide links and phone numbers to their local competitors.

Alternatively, if you don't care about your websites reputation, you could just fill it with porn, popups, or other content that users won't expect or want from a business.

It took me a while to spot that while wondering why most of the results are not relevant. Internet search just doesn't feel very good in general these days.

I mean, that's not really an appropriate place to be second guessed by a computer.

I also wish Google would detect when one page and another page are just the same content with different wrappers. You see this a lot with multiple sites that re post mailing list conversations. Google will not only return all the different sites, but will return replies, etc. as if they are unique results. So your entire first page can be a single conversation that just happens to be plastered all over the internet.

I've always suspected that this was actually a way to reduce their database size and simplify calculations (i.e. reduce costs and response time) rather than a way to make non-expert searches more forgiving. Non-experts weren't using quotes, and when they were, they meant them to be literal.

> I also wish Google would detect when one page and another page are just the same content with different wrappers.

I've never quite understood this. I consider it an abdication from even the attempt to be a useful, complete search engine, and the indication of a change in company direction.

Incidentally, DDG (my SE of choice) isn't much better at this stuff. Lots of repetitive listings of the same copy as top listings, and I think it stems quoted stuff. I'm forgiving because I think most of its results are derived from the results of larger indexes that adopted google's style.

Searching is most valuable when something is hard to find. If it's hard to find, then there's no way around being precise.

Correcting for sloppy queries only works when there are a limited number of things to look for and everyone is looking for one of those.

Making it easy for 90% of people to find 90% of the things they ask is in conflict with the ability for anybody to find the things which aren't easy to find in the first place. Leading, maybe, to those things effectively getting eliminated from the internet.

Would've preferred if it showed me "no results" instead.

Should do the trick

I don't know whether Google is good at understanding or not, but it's much better than other alternatives. At least for my queries.

Obviously it would have been better had she used the address listed on my website, or indeed the signature of every email I've sent her for the past few years, but she's a human, so allowed to make her own mistakes.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with Google making mistakes on my behalf however...

WRT your second suggestion, I disregard that option because:

1. Even though I own the trademark, I'm not selling anything. I wanted to own the trademark to avoid these kind of situation from happening.

2. IMO It's just not fair that I have to challange a scammer in this race, since he doesn't even have the right to be there in the first place. Google should just fix their broken process.

I'm not a lawyer, but my layperson's understanding of trademarks is that filing and owning it also bears the responsibility of defending it. When trademark challenges are left unchallenged, the trademark you own becomes more likely to be further impinged on in the future (i.e. you must show a history of maintaining and challenging other claims). This is the flipside of David vs. Goliath horror stories where large companies go after small business owners or individuals -- they're defending their trademark.

In this case, you might be able to argue deliberate trademark tarnishment[1] as a form of trademark dilution[2]; not sure if it will help but worth thinking about legal options now if this bothers you this much.

[1] https://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/Tradem...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution#Blurring_an...

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"Use the referral header or url tracking parameters to redirect the URL to some ..."

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I just searched this comment thread for the string "goat" and got nothing.

Come on! Where is the fun ?! Where did it go ?!

Google needs to be broken up and competition introduced again in this space. If Google Maps or Google Search didn't rely on the revenues from Google Ads, they would take things like this more seriously because they would need the revenues.

This happens tens of thousands of times per day, and the fact that they can ignore this is because they have a monopoly and they are abusing their monopoly position.

In the United Kingdom, you can sue Google for libel, as their misrepresentation of someone else as you harms you, and if you prove malice ('reckless disregard for the truth', which Google is clearly demonstrating) you can not only compel Google to remove the libelous material but also win damages from Google for their flagrant disregard for the truth.

What jurisdiction are you in?

The only way to deal with this is to get the listing removed. Use The google my business redressal form to do that.

Searching on Google for your website name, including the TLD, does not yield the business result, only searching for the equivalent of "itlab".

All in all it seems to me like Google should remove the business suggestion for that search, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you put it.

The business has reviews that suggests there is actually some IT consultation or support business there, is it possible they are actually operating under your name? Have you tried calling the number associated?

Rubyschool claims to be located in San Francisco here, though: https://github.com/rubyschool-us

I reached the same conclusion as @advisedwang by following OP's profile information.

It's possible that it'd overwrite the other business entry, or you might be able to report the business as a duplicate. At the very least, you might end up with both showing up stacked instead of just the one so you might reduce how many people interact with the fraudulent listing.

other than that... hire a lawyer and send them a cease and desist

It would be a terrible thing to do (you'd never get your reputation back), but it would be interesting to see what happened.

I've also asked friends and colleagues to request the same removal and report that listing, but nothing happened.

The message feels more like one to placate users into believing their concerns will be addressed, and hoping said users won't follow up on it to see if any action has been taken. I do hope I'm wrong.