Thanks for publishing this article – it is something that needs to be fixed.
Tracy

Google’s fixation with distance from perceived location of the searcher is totally nuts, too. Sitting here in North Portland, Google wants to find me businesses as close to downtown as possible. A fine strategy if you truly know the searcher’s location (i.e. mobile device with GPS location info shared), but IP geolocation is really a TERRIBLE way to do this for Google Places results.

This is additional evidence that Google treats deep pockets preferentially. In this economy, I find that quite pathetic.

I’ll add some more business categories to Gary’s list:

Building Contractors
Carpet cleaning services
Painters
Technical Writers
Any matter of freelance workers, the number of which has multiplied since the unemployment crisis of the past few years.

Google – part of the 1%!

But here is what I think is stupid about Google Places.
I have many Charter Boat Captains that fish out of Fort Lauderdale. Some of them live in Fort Lauderdale so they just use their home address. But what happens to a Captain who fishes in Fort Lauderdale but lives in the next city over Pompano? Well you just use his home addres too, Right? But here is the problem, his site never appears for Fort Lauderdale Fishing phrases on Google Places even though his site is SEO’d for everthing Fort Lauderdale. Even though the categories selected on the Places form were Fort Lauderdale. He has not one word about Pompano on his websites. But if you type in the phrase Pompano Fishing, guess what? He is number one. And nobody types in Pompano fishing. The Google Local should be for every business but apparently it’s not.

I think Google needs to distinguish between those companies whose product or service is physically delivered and those who can deliver their product or service by mail, download, etc.

If the service is physically delivered to the customer and the company is set up to do it then the clearly the company should have a local listing – just like the business pages in the local phone directory.

I’ve noticed that Google has this fixation with locality in other areas – like Checkout. I gave up on it a few years ago after trying unsuccessfully to persuade them to allow more than one currency per merchant.

My issue with google places is at times it seems they want to pin me to my locale. Last I checked www stood for “World Wide Web” not “Local Narrow Web” limited to my physical neighborhood.

Picking up the phone doesn’t make the business ‘open’ so the hours they posted as being ‘open’ were false therefore their listing is inaccurate.

With a world of tele-commuters and entrepreneurs trying to compete with low-margin businesses, we’re going to see more and more businesses without a traditional brick-and-mortar location in the future, not less.

I hope Google reconsiders their position on this matter as well.

Here are a few affected businesses that I’ve come across that fall in the same category:

Wedding Planners
Contracted Plummers
Contracted Electricians
Mobile Auto Detailing
Interior Designers

so many more it would take me days to write them down…

All of the above clients/businesses have NO brick and mortar presence and yet are very much “for real.”