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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

MapMaker Announces A New Bot to Fix Map Maker – Plus Page Inconsistencies

Last week, the Google MapMaker team announced (thanks to Forum TC Treebles for a heads up on this) a new bot whose purpose is to help fix Map Maker – Plus Page inconsistencies. The bot is called the “Mapmaker Syncer”.

The purpose of the change is to lay the foundation for better and quicker synchornization between MapMaker and the Google+ local/Maps listings. But like all bots unleashed in MapMaker, there appears to be a dispute about whether overall data quality has improved or been set back… the reality appears to be best stated by this poster in the MM forum: “Technically, the bad data was already there in some database, and now that the databases are synchronized (or are being synchronized), you have a chance to get rid of the bad data and have the changes you make in Map Maker elsewhere.” Like with all of these changes it will create an improvement for some users and a wild ride for others.

Here is the full announcement:

Dear users –

As several of you must be aware, local business listings information provided by Google is synthesized from a few different sources. Among these sources is Map Maker, with the content coming directly from all of you.

The data collected by these multiple sources resides in databases that are algorithmically kept in-sync. On occasion, however, some content across these databases may not synchronize as desired and lead to annoying data issues.As a  first step to address this problem, we have been working on improving the quality, frequency and speed of the process that reconciles these data bases. We have made a significant adjustment and before rolling it out, wanted to let you all know about this and any changes this might cause.

As a one-time event, you will see (might have seen these yesterday, depending on your time zone) bot edits that lead to either minor changes to the current data or add additional attributes to the data.This will only impact local business listings. In both cases, the bot will synchronize the data you see on Map Maker with what you see in Google Maps or Google Plus Pages. This creates the foundation to then launch new logic and systems that will synchronize the two data sets faster and more frequently. Kindly note that this step in itself is only part of the solution – it is the necessary first step – to fix many other issues that several of you have identified relating to inconsistent data between what you see on Plus Pages (previously Place Pages) and Map Maker.
While we have tried to ensure correct operation, it is possible that there may be some unintended issues. If you do notice any, please let us know on the forums so we can respond as quickly as possible.

As a Map Maker user myself, here’s wishing that the bot does not get crazy along the way anywhere….I will be keeping a close eye out along with some of the team here.
Thanks,
Jayanth, Product Manager of Map Maker – on behalf of the Map Maker team