Google has a the market share here in the US.No one uses the yellow pages we have delivered every year,there door stops.
My business is a little different, i advertise on craigslist and have free business listing with every search engine i can.
I own a mobile auto repair business, alot of my customers come from 1411 information services and people searching “roadside assistance or roadside service”" on there smart phone.
With google going thru its growing pains it is costing me greatly.What would you do in my place, i have posted aver and again in the LBC forums about my issues with little help.
I do have regular customers that i service there fleet vehicles but as the economy slows so do the miles on there vehicles.Google is my fall back cash sourch.

I own a mobile auto repair business and have had my listing poof into thin air 3 times in a 4 week period. My business listing accounts for about 40% of my cash flow and every minute its down i loose out.
I have been able to get 1 google employee to help out and get the listing back up, but she could not tell me why it went poof?

As well i have had issues with other business’s posting bogus reviews with no ability to contest them.There is a clear path to follow back to the business bashing mine.I am considering using adwords but am affraid, yes i said it , affraid the same thing will happen with down time.

Alot of my business is late night eraly morning , when google does its down time for fixes and such which it happens to be when the listing has been down all 3 times.Should i invest into adwords?Will it have the same issues?No one has been able to guarantee me this.

WHELP!!!

… with the exception of “It makes businesses that are shown happy”…. The LBC glitches and spam do the opposite. They cause frustration, stress, and a huge distraction from productive business activities for a very large number of small businesses.

… my words of wisdom to all that have been spammed and are not insured against legal expenses is to threaten legal action and state that if you have to pay the £500 for a solicitors warning letter, you will pursue this expense and escilate proceedings through the small claims court instead…. this way it costs very little

Google’s goal is to organize all of the world’s information. They present information on the main search page that they think people are looking for. They then test the results to be sure that the results are what people want and if they are not, they change them.

So we can only assume that when someone types “Restaurant, Olean” in Google and Google returns the 10 Pack at the top that searchers respond positively to that.

Google obviously receives several benefits:
1)It keeps searchers happy
2)It makes businesses that are shown happy
3)It provides a path for SMBs to move from the LBC into adwords.

Adwords growth will ultimately come from this market.

As to whether I know the reason for its creation….no, I have no special insight into Google in this matter.

I just dont get the purpose of LBC over the organic search.

Maybe it is to ‘dilute’ the benefit of businesses gaining too much of a commercial advantage from being top of the organic search…. It allows more business listings to be displayed on the first page increasing choice. Is this the reason?

The only benefit I see for Google is that the company now has a database of the majority of businesses and locations.

Do you know the reasons for its creation?

You are paddling upstream on this one. The world is local, Google wants and needs to be there. They think they have a competitive advantage with it and they will continue to push it…

We can only hope that Google implements standards equal to the Trading STandards in the UK…it is bizarre in some sense that a for profit entity gains some much power over essentially what should be a public resource