All Sales & No Service: Google?s Small Business Priorities Are All Messed Up

[djbaxter]

All Sales & No Service: Google?s Small Business Priorities Are All Messed Up
by Matt McGee
Sep 8, 2011

Google is, again, wiping the egg off of its company face this week after the New York Times exposed yet another way in which some users are manipulating Google Places to the detriment of unsuspecting small/local business owners.
The latest issue involves unscrupulous individuals/companies marking other businesses as closed in Google Places. It?s a process that the Times? article calls ?surprisingly easy? to do...

The underlying problem is that Google has taken the attitude that Google Places (or Maps as it was called originally) is a wiki. (That?s Google?s word for it, too. I wrote about this on my own blog almost three years ago: Google?s Hypocrisy: Search Spam and Map Spam.) Mike Blumenthal once changed Microsoft?s campus into an escort service on Google Maps and, when this latest problem with open businesses being listed as closed came to light, he managed to list Google?s HQ as closed.

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