Microsoft swings hard at Google, calling it a copyright infringer. Google says yes, we’re planning to do more with Apple and yes, we were arrogant in the past. Yahoo and Google execs work for $1 per day (you could, too, if you had their stock). Is th…

Only Google MAY know…and then again they might not know the extent of bad data.

Load it up and unleash it. Was there an effort to cleanse or verify the information. Who knows. That is a very time consuming process. I’ve been involved in that on smaller regional lists of data.

As reports, and mistakes get reported we will get a SENSE of the data but that is about it.

One method of cleansing a system of this scope and size is via the annual republishing of a paid YP directory.

The scope of new business failures is large. Businesses, move and change nature all the time. Aggregate years of data…and there are bound to be lots of errors.

There certainly is bad data in Google’s database and they certainly are making Local data more visible. I would also strongly agree that Google, before this harms their image, needs to make corrections more transparent and speedy.

I would caution though that you can’t prove the rule by a single example. In any database like this there will be errors. Statistically though, how accurate is the data set? How accurate does it need to be satisfice?

There needs to be better analysis of Google’s aggregate data to pinpoint the source and nature of the problems AND, as you point out, Google needs to do a better job of allowing speedy corrections.

I also saw that one. After 3-4 years of never getting a call that reflected user frustration we received a couple of calls in February from potential customers saying something like: “finally someone answered a phone”. That was because of inaccurate data showing in G maps inserts into organic search. I attribute that directly to both the power and visibility of G maps and BAD DATA.

Google needs to put more manpower into customer service to correct errors within its maps data base.