You know besides the lack of transparency and how difficult it is to correct something there is even something more bothersome to me.

That is the lack accepting responsibility for the problems. With fraud with Visa or MC the consumer has a $50 maximum. That seems a reasonable and fair way to split the risk. That creates a system of trust and a willingness to switch.

In Local not only do I see none of that, it is even hard to get them to acknowledge that there are mistakes.

Mike

Its hard to determine the percentage of accuracy. I don’t believe we have a fix on that.

We see the egregious errors, and you do a masterful job of reporting them. On the other hand you’ve done some research in Olean and Buffalo (I believe) that suggests a majority of accurate data.

I don’t know what the percentage of accurate to inaccurate data is. The specifics of inaccuracy come out in the annecdotal complaints in google groups for business owners.

I do believe there should be different standards for purposeful inaccuracy and malicious misrepresentation.

Even with a less severe standard for “mistakes” our big friend Google could benefit with your suggestion for a “correct this information” button for algorythm errors that pop up in things like plusboxes

Dave

Distinction that you make between bad data and fraudulent data seems to me critical to move forward.

Everyone I interviewed agreed that accuracy stinks. We can assume that we will need to live with bad quality to some extent, but we don’t need to assume that we need to live with the opaqueness, lack of standards and poor responses that we have seen from Local Search Engines when we do report errors and fraud.

Mike

Really interesting comments.

Having been both a long time retail real estate broker and a retailer I was fascinated by Lynn’s response.

Maintaining that data on a real time basis is difficult. Having done it personally and built my own data bases of retailers, spaces, contacts, etc. it is a difficult time consuming job. There is no ONE ultra reliable source for maintaining fresh real time updated data of the type that he described.

To this day, I see live websites of b&m businesses that have closed. I suppose the websites won’t go dark until its time to renew the site. Similarly businesses might take calls with answering services even after they have closed the doors.

From the spam or affiliate side its a different issue.

If a competing business thinks they can gain a competitive advantage by creating something akin to mapspam….with many locattions….who is to stop them then the “collective conscience on the web” or alternatively competitors. A third alternative are the disgusted customers recieving bad information. In those cases they may either consider it “too much of a hassle” to report the bad information, or ignore it and go to the next piece of information or business, hoping it will be accurate. Not a lot of incentive or time to go around reporting bad information.

From an affiliate perspective…..should an affiliate get in the middle of a transaction its a shame for the consumer.

I know from past experience, if I’m driving to a city, and I load up with 5 or 6 hotel phone numbers I can call ahead for reservations for a night or two and normally negotiate favorable rates, (assuming all hotels aren’t booked up.). Aggressive hotels, (or virtually any retailer would rather make a sale at half price than no sale at all.

Putting affiliates in the middle of transactions cuts the opportunities for consumers to take advantage of this opportunity.

Finally, having taken the time to speak with an old time cartographer/mapper who has seen his hard copy map business take huge hits versus the businesses that have created maps for mapquest/google/yahoo he has explained that the detail and work involved in creating maps is dramatically less by the map creators for the web than was done in the past for hard copies (at least by his company). He knows the cartographers for the web mapping companies. They used to work with him. The standards and work efforts have been compressed and are less rigorous.

Ha….once when we were chasing some mapspam, Mike, I used the old hard copies of a more accurate map to verify that addresses on a web map were inaccurate.

I suspect if the errors aren’t egregious they will go unnoticed and unreported by most.

Dave