Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Noted



EV reader Grant shared the above screengrab from Google Maps... showing that the description for Asian Taste on Avenue B and Third Street shows up as "My hot china wok balls, dipped in chilli oil, placed ..." when you type "24 hour food" into the Goggle Map search. Apparently it has showed up since at least this past weekend.

A variation of that description came up on our own search today...



From here, you could then find the full geo-tag description, which ends with the placement of those said "hot china wok balls."

Typing in Asian Taste Avenue B (or a variation of that) leads you to the usual listing on Google Maps.



Not sure why someone targeted the quick-serve restaurant with the sophomoric hack. This 2014 piece in Wired outlined how Google Map hackers have targeted small businesses in the past.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to Yelp there's also a "secret" Pho and "secret" pizza pop up that claims to be at 99 St Marks between A & 1st. It's clearly fake though as it's someone's apt with a neon pizza sign in the window.

Anonymous said...

This has been here for months. I tried to go in and tell the nice lady behind the counter, but she pulled it up on her phone and showed me that it wasn't there because if you type in Asian Taste it still comes up. I told myself I would try harder next time, but haven't been back since. They also changed the phone number to 666-6666 which is not cool to do to a small business.

Anonymous said...

This just tells you what jackasses are around: idiots with nothing better to do than try to ruin someone's business. Fools worthy of the Trump Shithead Award.

This should be reported multiple times to Google; hope whoever did this gets arrested.