The New Google Places – For Better or Worse?
In the midst of congressional hearings late this past summer, Google received steadily mounting criticism and some pretty negative PR from many brick and mortar businesses. It turns out that users, most likely the local competitors, were abusing the open and democratic nature of Google Places by reporting that a business had been closed permanently, when in fact they were still alive and well. Without any sort of safeguard installed, Google had no way of verifying the validity of these dishonest claims, much less a system for penalizing the occasional unscrupulous user.
At the risk of causing further harm to mom-and-pop business around the country, Google issued a public statement announcing a new method for verifying the validity of those permanently closed listings. “We have removed the interim notification about a report having been made so that a listing will only be updated after it has been reviewed by Google and we believe the change to be accurate,” states the Mountain View based company.
Fast forward to mid-October. The search engine giant has recently issued another potentially landmark decision.
Rather than limit user generated changes, which would have been the knee-jerk reaction, Google has placed even greater trust in users reporting vital business information such as location, hours of operation, and whatnot. So when a user suggests a change to a business’ Places listing, Google will automatically update the organic listing and send the business owner a verification email. Finally, the owner will have ultimate authority by deciding if they agree or disagree with the proposed Places changes.
Ultimately, it seems that the only true “safeguard” Google employed was a verification email relying on the owner’s feedback. Businesses could still become victims of competition as the owner might forget to reply to an automatically-generated email, or it could become lost in the shuffle. Meanwhile, the ultimate question remains: exactly how will these recent Google Places changes affect local, brick and mortar business? While it’s rather difficult to tell at the moment, one way or another, users will undoubtedly continue finding ways to beat the system.
