A sneak peek at the downturn & its effect on Google
This evening my wife and I were driving around Issaquah looking for a place to have dinner. Neither of us know the area very well, so I was searching for restaurants on my G1.
Our results were very interesting: 30-40% of the places we found via Google maps had closed their doors.
You can’t really blame Google, it appeared these were all fairly recent closures, and it isn’t as if Mom from Mom & Pop’s Bar & Grill phones Google to let them know they are out of business.
It does have a very negative impact on the Google experience, however. If I have this much trouble now, what will it be like in 6 months to a year when things are really bad?
Google’s approach at curation is to let the relevant percolate to the top. This works for active areas of interest, but once your focus narrows enough, you end up with derelict pages, old information, or closed restaurants.
Maybe some other company will come along with an innovative solution to what I see as a growing curation problem by culling no longer accurate results, or maybe Google will make progress in this area on its own.
Either way, I’m guessing this experience is only going to get more commonplace as stores and restaurants close, dotcom companies go dark, and people no longer have time to work on their blogs, open source or other pet projects. Who’s going to clean up the mess?
