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> . In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the s
by judge2020 5y ago
> . In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website
Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the same one that dictates what appears in Google Maps for claimed businesses), so if the owners are updating their website but not updating that (or checking their email for emails from google that say '[business], are you open on 4th of July?') it'll show incorrect info.
- neartheplain 5y agoEven if 90% of businesses play along (doing Google's data entry work for them), the 10% chance of my wasting half an hour makes it worth ignoring the info box and double-checking each time.
- clydethefrog 5y agoIt has also been a waste of working hours at our offices. I work at libraries and am responsible for the communication towards visitors — we are slowly opening up all our venues again with lifting of corona measures, which mean we need to update our opening times. With one click I can reverse them on our own website but I have to update every location manually on google results. Anyone can also change these opening times plus they might just change them again based on some third party website that scrapes outdated opening times.
- mananaysiempre 5y agoI don’t know what the prioritization is if you are e.g. explicitly registered in some Google database, but I’ve had a good experience with just marking up the opening hours (addresses, etc.) with RDFa (or Microformats or whatever else Google accepts these days) on the official website. Of course how easy it is depends on the number of layers between you and the actual HTML, and my case was rather straightforward (three locations with separately listed addresses and opening hours), but you might want to check if it’ll take some of the pain out of the process.
- da_chicken 5y agoThat's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault. Making it sound like the business's fault for not using Google's other service is just reinforcing the idea that Google's information is the only information that's real. This is the problem with the web search and scaping provider also trying to be a thousand other services at the same time. It's a constant conflict of interest.
- dntrkv 5y ago> That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault. Huh? If the business owners aren't updating the correct info in My Business, how can that possibly be Google's fault?
- wizzwizz4 5y agoBecause this means My Business is not fit for purpose. Google is a web search engine, not a Google proprietary DB search engine.
- dncornholio 5y agoGoogle is an advertising company.. not a search engine
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Google is an advertising company Google is a company that sells space for ads; an “advertising company” conventionally refers to a company that designs ad campaigns and purchases ad space for them on behalf of a client. > not a search engine. No, its both. Just as historically newspapers publishers in the US have been both producers of newspapers and companies that sell ad space.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoGoogle the company is an ad intermediary company. Google is also the colloquial name of Google Search.
- nyhc99 5y agoGoogle recently changed the hours of operation on my business' Google My Business listing to an hour later than I had it set to. I have no idea why; I certainly didn't tell them to. We found out when we got some angry calls from customers who showed up after we were closed. It's hard to explain to someone that we don't own our own listing on Google, and that we're at their mercy to approve the changes we submit and hope they don't make their own arbitrary updates.