I had an interesting conversation with a programmer whom I respect this morning who was looking at Yahoo Local and Google Maps business listings (in an industry that presumably has nearly 100% website penetration). He pointed out the following:
• Google and Yahoo seem to have almost the same name/address/phone info
• But Google has much better abstracts and web pages (i.e. web site url).
• Google has about 80-90% of its business listings associated with web pages,
• Whereas Yahoo has 52% of its business listings associated with web pages
I have found Yahoo Local’s ranking algo to be simpler than Google’s but it appears that there is more difference in the backend than just that.
That is interesting. Did your programmer friend look at only one topic in one community or did he/she look at more than one topic.
I would have assumed that both Yahoo and Google assembled data from the same sources and number of sources but a difference between 90% and 52% is significant.
What is going on? Is google processing information better? Is it cleaning information better? Are more businesses contacting google local business center and updating information than contacting Yahoo Local and doing the same?
If google is doing a better job of entering and collecting data than it will be the more authoritative source by a long shot.
Dave
Comment by earlpearl — December 18, 2007 @ 7:22 pm
He was comparing buisness listings between Yahoo Local and Google maps in a specific industry which presumably has a very high business website penetration level.
So while the basic info was roughly comparable Google’s ability to attach a website/business abstract to that listing was an order of magnitude better.
I presume that while both companies index roughly equal amounts of the web, and buy similar business lists and other business data, it appears that Google’s ability to match those disparate data sources and types into a single whole business record is better.
I would agree that if that is in fact the case they will become defacto leaders in local as well…
Mike
Comment by Mike Blumenthal — December 18, 2007 @ 8:45 pm