Miriam

psst…psst…you didn’t hear it from me but every McDonald’s listing that I looked at sat unclaimed and “prime”d for a sweet, vegan community editor to beefup their listing. See this search. How about MickeyDeads or McCholesterol?

Mike

Hmm, don’t give me any ideas, Mike.
Miriam

I am by no means an expert on this subject, but I believe that the folks like Navteq then buy the data from InfoUsa and Axciom and then try to further improve them by adding observations from their own street driving teams. Navteq then sells it to Google who then tries to improve it even further by layering in page scraping and Local Business Center data.

Sure, we could have the government do all of this themselves using taxpayer money… but frankly I am not sure the results would be any different.

And while I am sure not very many people will agree with me here, but I see many of these listings as essentially advertising. So I am not sure I want to use my tax money to help businesses advertise themselves to me for free using my own money. Something seems wrong there.

I am suggesting that the governments list of businesses is probably the best reflection of going concerns, they also know when someone closes their doors often more quickly than Google does.

I am only speaking in a theoretical sense that the market doesn’t always have the best solution.

For example the government could maintain a list, allowed measured changes to it and then like with ICANN allow users to update for a small fee. The argument that the market is the best solution is a religious based idea not a factual one. It works sometimes and not others.

Mike

We have already, as taxpayers, paid for the internet once, and continually pay to have our income and payroll taxes collected by the Government. They actually have the best list of active businesses and could provide that information in a sensible way for Google and everybody elses uses. Free market don’t really exist and when we try them (banking anyone?) they have a tendency to implode.

@David

Removing your listing, given how Google works, is unlikely to solve your problem. Google gathers primary business listings from companies that gather it from the phone books, the counties etc and then matches that up to information it finds on the web. As soon as they re-add a new list from one of their data suppliers your listing is likely to show back up. When it does it create a new cluster and reattach the old info from that directory.

You are stuck I am afraid with what Google has to offer.

Mike