Not much has changed in the 14 months subsequent. In some ways, things have gotten worse. But as you point out, Yahoo does not generate as much traffic although it still amounts to a sizeable amount.

Ok so we’ve agreed that the free thing is no excuse for Google to do a poor job of communication. That brings us back to the question of why doesn’t google do a better job of getting the “automated touch” as it were?

Your point about their culture and origins is very to point, and they have apparently applied a lot of their programming talent to the algo as opposed to the process. They are lead by programmers not marketers that is for sure.

Sometimes this appears as hubris (like when they assigned competitors URLs to the wrong local listings: here and here ) but as you point out I think it just blindess to the issues.

Mike

I’m still thinking about how amazing it is that Yahoo had to go to so little effort to make you feel ‘taken care of’, that you’d had communication with them. I feel like that about Barnes & Nobles. Their confirmation emails saying the package is in their warehouse, now it’s been shipped, now it’s heading my way…I really love that. I know it is all automated, but it does act as a voice of consideration coming out of the void that is the Internet.

Interesting subject!
Miriam

All that has happened here is that Google has shifted costs. The data aggregation is done by someone else, the reviews are gathered at the review sites are scraped, the data maintanence is done by the small business person or their proxy. If there is a problem with the data who pays the price (ala the Duke or the Pittsburgh Tech school)?

Google has developed a great algo and uses it to effectively present information. But even there who pays the price when they make a judgement call that affects the particpants (ala Denver Florist)?

Google profits from the data and their ordering of it and has a responsiblity to handle the stake holders with integrity. Just because you haven’t paid for the privelege of being listed doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs both direct and indirect to you or your clients.

While local is about people, in our society it is also about profit. Google has developed a cost effective way to deliver customers to the smb’s and they have profited by having automated that task. They may not being able to dominate all aspects of local with this model but in the end if it is more cost efficient & has shifted more costs and ends up more profitable, they will dominate as capital flows to them and away from higher cost models.

But as you note Google seems blind to the human side of the equation and one really hopes that they figure out how to do better than that. One also hopes that they can get their darn software to work better (sheesh this is starting to sound like another company I know).

Mike