Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Google enhances discoverability of businesses in Streetview
At the Google Lat-Long, Google has announced a new release of local businesses annotations “to help improve the discoverability of content in Street View….For now, browsing a location in Street View will show the top listings for that immediate area. We will be extending this coverage soon to include more businesses and also transit locations” (Click on the pin).
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Note also that if you scroll over the truck in this image, some of the original base level icons show as well (although apparently not those that were given icons by virtue of their Favorite Places awards):
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Google has noted that Google that Google Earth has more usage on the iPhone than on the Mac. Going forward, the type of immersive enivronment offered up by Streetview and Google Earth is likely to achieve its most popularity in the mobile world.
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Comments
6 Comments
Help! I’m not sure if you’re making an ironic demo of this, Mike, but why is the Royal Siam Restaurant in a van? I’m missing something, I know…
@Miram
No irony intended. Just a bad example in which the truch drove in front at the wrong time. I have modded the sample so you can better see what I mean.
@Miriam In many cases the default geo-coded location of a street address lands in the middle of the road, not at street side. So unless the business owner moved the marker location over onto the building outline, it’s stuck out on the street. The tiny map view you have inside the LBC while editing your listing is scaled such that the marker probably looks close enough for most business owners. Only zooming in shows it’s in the street. And in this case, in a van. Or maybe they are adding a delivery service for their thai food. yum
Thank you, Mike. This is certainly interesting, but I do feel it’s confusing that the markers are in the road, as Steve has pointed out. I still have some trouble using StreetView with ease to zone in on different features in the city scape. I’m not sure if it’s me being clunky or StreetView being clunky, but the finer manoeuvres are still not natural to me. This is definitely a noteworthy new level of data, Mike.
As Stever points out the tiny map view available in Google Places makes accurate alignment of the business difficult if not impossible thus leaving the icons floating in the middle of the road.
It has long been a gripe of mine that the interface to accurately place your business is so lame. Now that Google has these many new tools and views they need to integrate a few of them into the Google Places management environment (can we go back to LBC now?) so that business can be pinned accurately,
The problem is related to the way geographic databases are build and used by different software.
As a street is represented by a center line, house numbers are connected on both sides of this line. If you move the POI of the restaurant away from the center line – the restaurant would disconnect from to the network and will not be properly reached by navigation systems. The navigation system might prefer a parallel street.
In other words – to keep a POI reachable by navigation systems – do not remove it from the main “artery” of the street. I honestly, do not think that Google stores two coordinates – one for Streetview and another for navigation.
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