The restaurant listings (and probably all listings) when through a major data update this past Thursday (12/21) which reordered results within the restaurant listings in Google Maps.

In mid November (11/15/06) I updated a restaurant listing at Yelp to standardize the business name and added a review. This was a test to see how long it took to show up in the reviews section on a restaurant in a small market. At the time the restaurant was listed at 22 in Maps. With this recent update, the Yelp review did not make it into the review section but did show up as a “web page” reference. No other changes were made and reviews that were made at Citysearch in May had still not been integrated.

Interestingly the restaurant moved from position 22 to position 2 in Maps but has not yet made it on to the front page “Onebox”.

In looking at the Buffalo listings that I wrote about earlier there was a fair bit of change as well. Here are the comparisons…

The Bradford changes seem to reinforce the idea that “web pages” seem to carry more weight in local than reviews do.

Although now there are additional 5 star restaurants (Hutch’s and Town Restaurant) that are ranking higher than the Anchor but have not appeared on the Google main page Onebox…in fact the Anchor seems to have disappeared from the local list altogether.