Understanding Google Places & Local Search – Developing Knowledge about Local Search

There is a story unfolding at Google that indicates a huge shift in their thinking about Places. Google, over the past 9 months has been making significant investments in creating support mechanisms for Google Places. Yes, you read that right. But just to be sure let me repeat myself: Google has been making significant investments in creating functioning support mechanisms for SMB problems with Places.

I never thought that I would be writing the words Good and Support and Google Places in the same sentence with a straight face but if current trends continue they are approaching that benchmark. Given that they literally had next to no support as recently as early summer, this demonstrates a significant resource shift and policy change.

Good support requires good processes, good people and good tools. And based on my observations over the past quarter Google has made significant progress in local on all of those fronts. Don’t get me wrong, there is still long way for them to go but there has been a tectonic shift on every front that indicates a 180 degree change in Google’s approach to the issues for SMBs interacting with Google in the free local space.

The History

Support, or rather the lack there of, the poor product quality and the inability to fix all too prevalent problems has been a common thread amongst critics, including myself, of Google Places for a number of years. I have penned a number of screeds on the topic and not one of them showed Google in a favorable light.

The problem has always been that Google would roll out upgrades to Places while never fixing bugs AND frequently providing no mechanism to fix the resultant bad outcomes. Even if these problems were the direct result of a Google decision there was no remedy. If it affected a very small percentage of businesses then you would have absolutely no hope of a solution at all. In fact often it wasn’t viewed as bug at all. In Google’s eyes, the sacrifice of accuracy for a few businesses to see the overall improvement of the index was a switch worth making. It was just the cost of being in the large data, local listing business.

A classic example was the problem of merged businesses. A merging between two distinct businesses into a single Places page was an artifact of the merge/purge routines built into the Maps algo. Two similar businesses, located nearby would become a single Frankenstein like record that showed part from one business dashboard and part from another.

There was no easy way for Google to separate the two. Certainly there was no easy way for the affected businesses to separate them. It required months of careful upstream cleansing of the local ecosystem for BOTH of the affected businesses. It affected a very small % of businesses but if you were the one affected it could be devastating to watch your traffic dry up as your phone stopped ringing.

At the end of the day, the affected business might make their way into the forums, beg, cry and whine. Perhaps their posting was flagged by a top contributor and if they were extremely lucky an engineer would ultimately look at the situation. But it could be months or more likely never. Unless of course you managed to get the case a fair bit of publicity and the shining light of publicity “encouraged” an engineer to take a look.

Clearly Google didn’t want to provide a fix or perhaps was unable to provide a fix at the individual listing level. It doesn’t matter, there was no fix.

But now I am beginning to see a new Google Places support structure emerging that (hold on to your seat…) actually seems to be working. And in a dramatic departure from past behaviors, it is one that acknowledges that the individual Place listing is worth fixing.

The forums: (more…)

Universities, hospitals, governments… it is often very difficult for them to get control of their listings in Google Places. Some of this is due to the claiming process and some due to the underlying nature of the way that Google assembles listing data. Regardless, when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work and, as this frustrated poster points out, could one day very well lead to a disaster. I was just too tired to post an answer in the forums to their query. Perhaps  one of you kind souls could help Frustrated UM out?

Yes, I’ve tried “edit” and I’ve tried “report a problem”.  Those functions are not working.  Here is what’s happening:

Many pages for the University of Montana have the wrong phone number on them.  They all have the phone number for Family Housing listed.  Therefore, Family Housing is being overrun with calls for Financial Aid, Human Resources, Mansfield Library, Registration etc.  They are also getting calls from people looking for Campus Security!  This has the potential to become dangerous.  Students are actually calling the wrong number trying to get to the Campus Police but are reaching Family Housing. Here are the locations that are wrong:

University of Montana: Financial Aid
University of Montana: Human Resouces
University of Montana: Campus Security
University of Montana: Registrar
University of Montana: Native American studies
University of Montana: School of Law

I’m sure there are more.  All of these have the same phone number listed (406) 243-6030, which is for family housing.  I’ve tried using the edit button and the report a problem button.  I’ve followed the steps but all I get back is an email that says “Thank you for updating Gizzy Pool”.  and then later another email saying “We could not update Grizzy Pool, the information could not be verified”.

I did not try to update the Grizzy Pool page (and it should say Grizzly Pool by the way).  I can get no other response.  What should I do?

Again,  before anyone tells me to try the Edit or Report a problem route, I’ve been trying for nearly 2 months with no other response except the Grizzy Pool emails

As I noted last week, Google Maps has managed to lose (more or less) the town of Rogers, MN….their “report a problem” feature notes that Map corrections take 30 days.

This widget will keep track of how long it actually takes for Google to find Rogers…the clock has started!

Will they meet their self imposed deadline? Will Rogers ever find its way back to the 7-Pack? Will they find the real Rogers?

Stop back next week to learn the exciting conclusion to this and other mysteries.

Wikipedia seems to know, Mapquest knows, Bing knows, even Google Organic seems to know something that is a secret to Google Maps & Google Universal results – the whereabouts of Rogers, MN.

Well its not exactly true that Google Maps doesn’t know where Rogers is. It is apparently more complex than that. But real life often is. The result though is the same.

The Cabellas store that is in Rogers, MN can’t be found by Google (it sends you to Owatonna, MN). The Hampton Inn & Suites that is in Rogers can’t be found by Google (it sends you to Minneapolis). The reality is that not much that exists in Rogers including emergency services (it sends you to Burnsville ..some irony there) can be found by Google. Essentially, everything in the town of Rogers, MN 55374 is MIA unless you search on the zip code instead of the town name.

It appears that Rogers, MN might actually be two places. One , an up and coming fast growth community that is 40 miles or so Northwest of St. Paul and one, that seems little more than a road sign, that is 70 miles southwest of St. Paul. If you look carefully (ie by zip code) you can find the principle Rogers to the NW of St. Paul. I have ground checked the Rogers, MN 55374 and found that it really does exist. I am not all that confident on the other. I couldn’t find anything or anybody there to call.

The problem is that when searching in Google, the apparent ambiguity is not recognized and, for whatever reason, the not so significant Rogers, MN gains precedence and nothing shows from the “real” Rogers. Thus no place in the Rogers, MN 55374 can be found. Not the baker, the butcher, not the candlestick maker and certainly not the doctor.

I attempted to explain this whole mess via the report a problem link but somehow the choices just didn’t seem up to handling the problem. I did, in the end, manage to file a report after being booted out of the system once.

But is that really enough? Will it really be fixed in the promised 30 days?

I am hoping that Google takes pity on the poor town of Rogers, MN zip 55374 and finds them a place in the Maps world sooner.

PS Before I finished the article I did get an automated response from Google on Problem ID 94CB-A209-B92C-FD74…..
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Today Google is changing the category structure and posting process in the Google Maps Help Forum in an effort to reduce miscategorization of topics and improve the quality of the help provided. All posts since the new forum was rolled out in January have been apparently been placed into the new categories:
Problems and Errors —> Map Won’t Load
For Business Owners —> Verification Issues
How Do I? —> Base Map Data

The move, while a big step in the right direction, will not really solve the customer support issues that Google faces in the SMB world.

In the current forums users typically mix questions across the categories and often cross post as they are unsure as to which category a query belongs. This move to upgrade the forums with more granularity has apparently been successful in other Google forums.

Google noted that “We’re hoping to also generate more discussion around the various features of Maps rather than simply providing a forum for transactional questions and answers”.

In the new layout, Google first asks users to identify themselves as either a business owner or not a business owner as to allow a choice to see all posts by business owners only.

The user is then asked to select one of the many new, more specific categories to post their question.   Google’s hope is that this will make it easier for them “to identify issues, find resolutions, and circle back in a more efficient way”.

-Maps User Categories:

Business Owner

Not a Business Owner

Topic Categories:

-Verification Issues
For business owners having difficulties verifying listings in the Local Business Center.

-Local Listing Issues
For users with questions about editing, adding, or removing business listings.

-Loading Issues
For users who are unable to use Google Maps because the map won’t fully load.

-Feature Requests
A place to share your ideas to help us improve Google Maps!

-Base Map Data
For users to discuss the current base map data for Google Maps.

-Driving Directions
For users to discuss best practices for getting driving directions, or to report driving direction issues.

-My Maps
For users creating personal, annotated, or customized maps.

-Street View
Discussions surrounding all things Street View!

Having spent a great deal of time in the forums, I think this change is very positive and will generally improve the overall environment of the groups and their usefulness. In many of the categories it will improve the ability of users to help each other and create more of a community feel as MyMaps users congregate or geeks talk of packet problems or firewall settings in the Loading Issues category.

But there is a limit to this strategy to improve the self help nature of the forums. When it comes to small businesses with problems in the Local Listing & Verification process, it is unlikely to be as successful as in the the other categories in changing the transactional nature of the Maps problem solving cycle. The reasons for this are several.
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Last night while at Marty Weintraub’s AimClear SMX East SchmoozFest, I was fortunate to meet Frederick Vallaeys of Google. He is the forthright (he gave me a business card!), communicative product evangelist for Adwords. He was on his way out the door but took the time to answer some of my questions about the newly announced Local Listing Ad product.

According to Frederick, email support will definitely be an integral part of the Local Listing Ad product. Supprt will take the form of an automated first response to the initial query with human escalation if the answer provided is not satisfactory. He noted that discussions were on-going and that all other support options, including the possibility of fee based phone support, were on the table but no final decision had been reached. He noted that he felt strongly that “people should be able to get their questions answered”.

Even though brief, the conversation was far ranging and touched on my of my questions about the new product:
-What will the prices be for a given market and category?
-Will the pricing be transparent to all, across all markets?
-How long will the price remain fixed and when it does change what will the procedure be?
-Will the price have a relationship to the adwords pricing and will that relationship be transparent?
-How will placement be determined in competitive markets?
-Will categorization be limited to the existing categories or will it allow for long tail catogorizaton?

Much of the conversation was off the record but it is clear that the process and procedures for this product are still very much a work in progress.

Support (or rather lack there of) for Local Bussiness Center users has long been an issue with Google with many serious problems going unanswered and unattended. Early this year, in a far ranging discussion about Why the Google Local Business Center Fails, Matt Cutts responded that:

Here’s my personal take on the “paid support” suggestion. Historically Google has been averse to offering paid support for free products. I think it’s because we don’t want to evoke the idea that Google has a conflict of interest. For example, if we offered paid support for (say) websearch, lots of conspiracy theorists would accuse Google of making search worse in order to make money off of people paying for support.

The new Local Listing Ads is an exciting product that will appeal to many SMB’s. It offers simplicity and a fair bit of transparency and can act as an effective first step for many local businesses in the world of on-line advertising. It could, by providing support for both Ad related AND other technical problems, improve the image of the Local Business Center in the marketplace.

I can envision those with solvable by Google only type problems signing up so as to just get their listing issues resolved. A 30 Day Free Trial could easily turn into 30 days of free support with an ad thrown in.

That being said, I am looking forward to Google working out the kinks on the way to this new product. It seems ideally suited to the needs of many businesses who are just now beginning to look to the Internet for an solution to replace the declining value of the print Yellow Pages and news papers.

Frederick will be speaking at Q&A session at SMX East this afternoon. I would encourage all of the Local world to come and get the answers to the many questions that you have had. Well, OK, to at least ask the questions.

When things go wrong with Google Maps, like all large scale systems, they go terribly wrong. Google Maps though, unlike most large companies, offers no mechanism for these problems to be fixed in any direct fashion.

While I understand Google’s desire to fix the big problems for large numbers of people first, there also needs to be a way for small people with personal problems that have been wronged to get their problem fixed. Currently the only way is to post into the Google forum, where a volunteer might bring an issue to Google’s attention and it may or may not get fixed. Is that the best that Google can do?

Here is my first example of Google Maps Customer Service Hall of Shame. This poster initially posted in the forums on August 9th. It was highlighted to Google at the time through their private Top Contributor system. This is the type of problem that is not really easily addressable by a volunteer nor should it be handled by a volunteer. It points out that forums are not the best place to get this sort of problem resolved. Here is the first posting from August 9th:

lrury2002 Level 1 8/9/09

Here is the second posting from August 18th. Both postings were highlighted for the Google Guides so that they could possibly take care of the issue:

lrury2002 Level 1 8/18/09

I think that this is the business listing being referred to:

I guess just can’t know whats going on in suburbia these days, can you?