My nephew and his fiancee recently moved back to Buffalo NY from San Francisco. Their dream was to help create and foster the art scene in the reviving Buffalo urban culture. So they created the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (aka BICA)¹. 

They bought some gallery space and put up a somewhat inadequate  SquareSpace website². They did, upon my advice, add events  to their site³.

And after some nagging⁴ on my part, they verified their Google listing. And despite Squarespace cocking up the schema, Google added their events to their business profile. 

Google has long spoken about the immersive search experience as a way to give the user the answers they are looking for. Without leaving Google. Probably not a bad idea in general for much of local.

But in this case, while a searcher may get immersed in looking for event details from the business profile ( aka Knowledge Panel) it really is more like an endless loop of idiocy.

Selecting the obvious links once a user has clicked through to the event on Google to get to the Institute’s website doesn’t take the user to the website at all. Google takes the user back to the business profile to try again.

What kind of crappy experience is that?

Head over to Google to try it: Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art

Click on an event and try it yourself⁵.

^{1- the least I can do is throw them a link. Is nepotism the same as buying links?}

^{2- Kids just don’t listen. I tried to tell them that there were better alternatives than SquareSpace but did they listen? Noooo.}

^{3- OK, they listen sometimes.}

^{4- Who? Me? Nag?}

^{5- Some brand searches couldn’t hurt either}