Worst impact and results from the insertion of G maps into organic searches

[earlpearl]

Local data across the board has a fair amount of errors within the data that they have scraped/copied from numerous directories.

The glaring example has been noted for hospitals, wherein various hospital listings within G maps show a slew of phone numbers. In certain cases some of them have been wrong.

In at least one example, it was causing a problem for one medical center-- Duke University Med Center,and that problem reached the discussion point on the web. (All or most of the problems were cured within a day).

In one other example a webmaster for a 2nd hospital reported the same problems (a hospital in NYC). Mike Blumenthal pulled the data from a number of hospitals http://blumenthals.com/blog/?p=139 and I found one error in the very first hospital I checked.

If I were Y or MSN, I'd clean up my hospital data in a New York second....and get it prominantly on the web.

That is an important source of phone numbers and would be a coup in comparing information and reliability amongst search engines.

just my humble opinion.

[Robert Paulson]

For my own company I've found data from review sites like those we listed elsewhere that are as many as seven years out of date (with equally outdated phone numbers) - so I guess they can only be as good as the sources providing them data. I need to find a spare minute to go update all of the different review sites....

[Bill]

Thinking out loud - is the maps program something they bought from someone else, or did they develop it themselves? If it was purchased, ala YouTube, searching for info about the original creators might be fruitful

To answer Robert's questions, some of it was developed in house, and some of it was acquired, some of it has been developed in the hands of people coming from elsewhere.

I thought it would be nice to put together some kind of timeline. Here's a rough one.

September 22, 2003

Google filed a patent on Address geocoding.

April, 2004

Google Local came out in April, 2004

October, 2004

Google purchased Where 2 Technologies in October 2004, and hired members of the Australian company, many of who have worked on Maps for Google since. A few of Google's 30+ patent and patent applications on maps and local search bear the names of at least one of the brothers who started Where 2 technologies. Most, but not all of these focus upon mapping, or driving directions, and not the results of local searches. Here are a lot of those, published at some point since Where 2 Technologies came along:

• 20070016368 Generating Human-Centric Directions in Mapping Systems
• 20060206264 Combined map scale and measuring tool
• 20060139375 Secondary map in digital mapping system
• 20060064241 Method and apparatus for customizing travel directions
• 20050288859 Visually-oriented driving directions in digital mapping system
• 20050270311 Digital mapping system
• 20050270305 Generating, storing, and displaying graphics using sub-pixel bitmaps
• 20050270299 Generating and serving tiles in a digital mapping system
• 20050182770 Assigning geographic location identifiers to web pages
• 20050119824 System for automatically integrating a digital map system

One or two of those have been granted within the past few months.

March 17, 2005

Google Local Business Center came out

April, 2005

Google added Satellite Images to Maps, shortly after they purchased Keyhole, Inc., which you may know better from Google Earth. At this time, Google Local and Google Maps were still separate applications. You would search Local for local business information, and Maps for locations and to get directions.

October 6, 2005

Google Maps and Google Local were merged together.

November 7, 2005

Google Local for Mobile was released.

March 31, 2006

Google added advertising to the merged Local/Maps

Aug 15, 2006

Google added coupons to Local Search

April 21, 2006

After the merger of Local and Maps, the application was referred to as Google Local. People liked the Maps name more, and Google changed it to Google Maps. The person making the announcement was Thai Tran, Product Manager, Google Maps and Local Search, who had formerly worked on maps with Yahoo!

Mid 2006

Daniel Egnor joined Google in 2003, and at some point started working on maps. He was the tech lead until mid-2005, and now, as far as I know, works on Web ranking algorithms. His name is on a number of the patent applications that came out mostly in mid 2006 on local search algorithms (along with other folks from Google).

• 20060271531 Scoring local search results based on location prominence
• 20060200478 Generating structured information
• 20060149800 Authoritative document identification
• 20060149775 Document segmentation based on visual gaps
• 20060149774 Indexing documents according to geographical relevance
• 20060149742 Classification of ambiguous geographic references
• 20060149734 Location extraction
• 20050065916 Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using location awareness

There are plenty more people involved, milestones, and pieces of the puzzle that may have come from other places (live traffic information from the Zipdash acquisition, for instance). But this is some of it.