My partner Jason just told me about a Google Local search experience he and Ryan McIntyre just had. They were out last weekend guitar shopping. Jason is looking for a custom shop Gibson ES-335 and can’t find one anywhere. (If you know where to find one, please email me.) They had planned a day of hitting every guitar store in Denver. On Google local, they found a listing for Cadillac Guitars. It was near the Denver Guitar Center, so they decided to visit it.
They went to the address, but instead of a guitar shop, they found Rupps Drums. They figured that they must have made a mistake, because clearly this store had been around a while. After driving around the block and checking the web again, they were clueless and decided to go into the drum store. They asked about Cadillac Guitars and were informed that they moved out over 15 years ago.
15 years ago? Bad data – oops. Now – I can’t bash Google because Judy’s Book shows the same listing, as does Yahoo, as does Yelp, as does … Someone needs to run a dedupe algorithm on addresses – oh – and fix the underlying data that everyone is using to seed their databases.