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Sphinn Home » Vertical Search
The Great Wall Of Google - A Short Essay On Communication--Local Business Owners Used and Abused by Google
Vertical Search News Source: http://www.solaswebdesign.net
Published: Jun 22, 2009 - 12:39 pm
Story Found By: earlpearl 964 Days ago
Category: Vertical Search
Miriam Ellis looks inside the Google Groups Forum for Maps and business owners and finds that Google is leaving the owners in the dark and problems and misinformation in Google Maps unanswered and unresolved.

The volume of frustrated business and website owners is stunning.
 Comments6 Comments  

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from sza 964 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I believe this is not something specific to Maps or Local. It seems to permeate Google’s whole culture, its corporate mentality.They, as a company, don’t believe in "human".They believe in "algorithmic", "scalable", "analyzable".Users are relevant for them as a faceless mass; as a vast source of data to explore; something to satisfy in statistically acceptable ways. Not something they want to deal with on an individual level.It’s been to their advantage in getting to where they are now -- but in the long run, it will be partly responsible for their fall from grace.

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from bbcarter 964 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I sent this to our AdWords support team. We get some help with other Google products thru them, but it’s still not perfect- e.g. we had problems with the local biz center bulk upload and with verifications... LBC peeps are not customer-facing, and seems like most Google teams are not. We’re grateful that we have some access thru AdWords, but if our agency’s clients weren’t spending so much on PPC, I doubt they’d help us in this way.  You can’t fault Google as a business for giving better customer service to those who bring them revenue, but their user satisfaction would be higher if they had more customer service overall. And this is the kind of thing that hurts their image and one day if there’s an alternative to Google, it will make more people jump ship, and faster.

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from MattMcGee 964 Days ago #
Votes: 1

I’ve had excellent human response/service from Yahoo as recently as 1-2 months ago when I accidentally uploaded the wrong image to a client’s Yahoo Local listing. Yahoo removed it within an hour and sent a personal email explaining what they’d done. You’d never get that kind of response from Google, sadly.

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from MiriamEllis 964 Days ago #
Votes: 0

We’ve all cut our teeth on an algorithmically administrated Google, and when it comes to Universal, I think that’s totally fine. We have the opportunity to make sure that all of the data on our websites is correct when people reach us via the SERPs. But what Local Search does is take control of the accuracy of businesses contact information out of the hands of its owners and allows third parties to administer and be responsible for that data, without the consent of the owner. When you couple this with a company (Google) doing this, getting it wrong and then offering business owners no way to contact them, you’ve got a totally unsatisfactory experience. An algo-based approach works for Universal - not for Local.Matt - I’ve talked to people at Yahoo! too. On the phone, even! Remarkable.Thanks so much for sphinning this, EarlPearl, and to everyone else who has sphunn it.

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from mbeijk 963 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Excellent post Miriam!It seems the only way to get any support off google is to spend big amounts of money on PPC and get yourself a contact from within. 

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from MiriamEllis 963 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Thanks, Martijn. And now, on top of this, we’ve got Google’s change in their emergency info policy (Mike blogged about this). I have to blog about it, too, as we have a post on the SEOigloo directing people to something that no longer exists, based upon Maps Guide Jenn Chin’s earlier advice. Further frustration.Really appreciate the sphinn!

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