expertSEM

Being one of the local search specialists around here, people often forward me articles and blogs they think I might be interested in. Today I was forwarded this article from NYTimes.com that really caught my attention. It’s been awhile since I stopped everything else to voice my opinion, but this one seemed to not represent the true going ons inside Google local search.

The article mentioned above highlights the wiki or self editing features of Google Maps. For those not familiar, Google gives anyone the ability to update not only the physical location on a map, but also the specific phone, address and name of a business. Unless you’re in the Boy Scouts and regularly observe and live by the honor system, that last sentence should immediately raise some eye brows.

I’m not going to go into the quality and accuracy issues within Wikipedia.com, but getting inaccurate information about Sinbad and getting wrong directions to a hospital because someone moved the map location are completely different. As we know by now, most Wikipedia errors are corrected within 24 hours, however, that can’t be said for Google Maps.

As the NYTimes article points out, Richard Hintz has made tweaks to more than 200 business listings and Faraz Ahmad more than 41,000 changes. This brings up the age-old question: If you are faced with the prospect of having brain surgery, who would you rather it be performed by, a surgeon trained at medical school or someone who has seen it done a few times? This is basically what Google has opened their doors to. For every Richard and Faraz mapping out their neighborhood correctly, there are five other citizens, business owners and competitors taking advantage of the system.

Taking advantage of the system includes everything from business owners maliciously changing a competitor’s store location and business details, to a locksmith taking over a major hotel chain listing so they have better web visibility. For an extreme example of this I have chosen to illustrate how easy it would be to change the information of the Whitehouse. In an effort to avoid being contacted by government officials, a quick disclaimer is necessary: I did not actually change any details to the White House listing.

To be fair, Google is attempting to recruit these ”brain surgeons” or actual business owners into updating their own locations, but that effort will never overcome the curiosity and ease of the public manipulation of business locations. The following quote from the article is putting entirely too much trust and ethical weight in the hands of the people that can also do the most damage:

“It is a huge shift,” said Michael F. Goodchild, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well.”

To prevent this from happening to your business, claim your business or hire a local map listings company to manage your business listings across the various search engines and internet yellow pages. In the bigger picture, Google just dropped its mapping provider, Tele Atlas, in place of their own solution. Allowing public edits has created incorrect maps and when people can’t find places correctly, they usually go to a different source that can.