As regarding your last paragraph, the truth of that has turned up in the many and varied comments appearing in google groups for business owners and a variety of other places where people comment.

Showing up highly ranked in google listings either through organic listings, paid listings or in one sort of map is vital to many entities. On the other hand, mistakes in google listings have caused problems for some entitities, the most glaring one I recall being a hospital with a large number of phone listings that were incorrect.

It has now been about 1.5 years since google extended its local elements into organic search. It has yet to create a simple mechanism to correct mistakes.

I suggest google needs to make the first move to “be held to a higher standard”. Its already getting the lion’s share of the complaints.

Dave

The question for me is if this is what the midgame feels like when the players are fighting for marketshare and theoretically providing better products as a result of competition, what happens when we reach the monopoly state in local search?

Mike

I don’t think the users or the businesses should struggle while the search engines determine the best way to do things. However, I do think that it’ll be a while before a successful, and beneficial, plan for local search is implemented. Until such time I think that it’ll feel like both the users and the businesses are suffering — though, in my experience, that’s what growth feels like.

Mike