The new features might also reveal some secrets of Google Maps ranking factors. It’s definitely a space that’s well worth watching for local search marketing experts.

Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.

It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.

The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?

Some business directories and data aggregators contain huge percentages of bad listings including gone-out-of-business companies and duplicated listings. Pankaj Mathur of InfoUSA recently estimated that some sources such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Acxiom, Localeze and Google Maps might contain 17-to-18-million records, or up to 4 million more records than actual, live businesses! That’s as much as a 28.6% error rate!

I know from experience that some percentage of a business directory’s bloat can be caused by inability to figure out if a business has closed up for good or not (most data sources are not set up to verify each individual business, although InfoUSA remains an example of the gold standard, relying on a practice of phoning each and every business to verify it’s viability at least once per year, and also using a number of other signals of possible closure). These old, dead business listings clog up a great many online directories and can result in poor usability when consumers attempt to drive to their doorsteps for products or services.

However, another source of bloat is in the form of duplicate listings, and as a search engine marketer, it’s these duplicate listings that my clients sometimes have which concern me highly. Just as with duplicate webpages in regular SEO, duplicate listings in business directories and within Google Maps can potentially dilute down a company’s possible ranking score, resulting in lower overall rankings and poorer online performance.

Back in February, Google and other search engines jointly announced support of a canonical tag for webpages, enabling webmasters to specify which page URL should be treated as the main/authoritative one for search engine indexing in cases where multiple URL variations could occur.

If such a protocol makes sense for the general web search engines, why not a protocol to assist in reducing dupes in local search, too?

Google Maps help suggests that users can help them identify cases of duplicate listings, but the problem is that dupes may be constantly coming in through all of Google’s various data partners.

At the recent Kelsey Conference, local directory industry experts predict that Cost-Per-Call is increasingly going to become a dominant pricing model and this will mainly happen through individual directories displaying different tracking phone numbers for the same businesses – and all these different channels with separate phones feed into Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Bing Maps, and other local search engines. So, potential issues from many various phone numbers could be increasing.

Tracking phone numbers are not the only potential problem – sometimes a company’s alternate phone numbers and fax numbers will get parsed off into separate business listings, causing further instances of duplication.

So, how could this “Canonical Phone Tag” effectively be accomplished? hCard Microformat already provides a framework for doing something like this. A canonical phone tag could be formed like this:

<abbr class=”tel” title=”000.867.5309″>000.123.4567</abbr>

In this example, webpage users could see the “000.123.4567″ tracking phone number when they view the webpage, and the machines could instead glean the authoritative, canonical phone number for the business, “000.867.5309″, and ignore the tracking number.

So, is this a solution in search of a problem?

How many of you have encountered instances where a tracking phone number has gotten indexed in a separate listing alongside a business’s primary phone number/listing? If so, this solution may be worthwhile to consider in keeping all of a business’s ranking weight combined in one listing as opposed to distributed across many.

Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:

“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”

I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space & Key to Click-Fraud Detection“. My earlier description of them reads practically as an endorsement – something I very rarely do at all. But, I think what I wrote is pretty accurate, overall. Quova is considered pretty much best-in-class of the companies providing geolocation data mapping, because of their greater variety of geo data sources, their more sophisticated mapping methods, and because they actually submit to a third-party audit for data accuracy.

As I’ve described previously, there are quite a number of providers out there which try to associate endusers’ IP addresses with geographic location coordinates, but I’ve always been a really huge skeptic of the overall error rates associated with this type of data. In the past there were estimates that geolocation error rates could be anywhere from 50% to 85%! For marketers attempting to precisely target ads and content to geographically cohesive groups, such high error rates were far too high to be acceptable from my P.O.V. five years ago.

For all geolocation data companies, error rates increase as the geotargeting level becomes more precisely granular. In other words, most of these companies likely have very high accuracy for country-level geolocation capability, lesser for regional targeting such as state or province level, less than that precision for city-level, and lowest accuracy for ZIP-code or postal-code level targeting.

I’ve also been highly skeptical in the past because there’s a low ability to actually test how accurate a given company’s data may be — most testing is based on sample sets which I’ve suspected may be highly skewed towards more accurate geolocations. Anecdotal stories of erroneous geotargeting have come up repeatedly throughout the industry, while there are few ways of calculating actual error, and geolocation data companies reiterate unverifiable claims of accuracy rates.

However, innovations such as found in this patent awarded to Quova help in improving the stature of the whole industry, and really help to reassure marketers and security administrators that the data is solid. I can critique testing methodologies for auditing the data, but I get less strident about it when I can see that the methods by which the data was arrived at are improving and are far less prone to error rates.

Since increasing amounts of advertising targeting are being based upon geotargeting, and since so much of our security screening of PPC ads’ click-through results are being based upon geolocation data as a major component of analysis, I think it behooves companies to use very high-quality data. Quova’s historically high price tags have caused some to look for cheap and easy alternatives, but people should be very careful about the methods used by those other companies. In many, many cases, the cheaper alternatives equate with far less sophisticated methodologies, which also equate with higher error rates. And, auditing undoubtedly also adds overhead to the pricetag, but using data that has zero third-party checks will open companies to greater liability.

Most of the cheap companies are using only ARIN network data which has a lower accuracy level than if it was further enhanced by data from major ISPs and network tracerouting.

Except for the simplest applications which do not involve security and fraud analysis, I think that Quova’s industry-leading patents in geolocation make it so that other geodata companies’ products cannot realistically compete in this arena.

Crimes at Texas A&M U (click to enlarge)

One of the very earliest Google Maps mashup applications was another site which also pinpointed crime data with its real-world locations: ChicagoCrime.org, created by Adrian Holovaty. Graphically displaying crime info and statistic info onto map locations is one of the more compelling applications for online maps, IMHO.

I grew up in a college town and attended university there (College Station was the town and the University was Texas A&M) – and I recall that reading the Police Beat section of the school newspaper was one of the more entertaining pasttimes for the generally sleepy town. The university officials always took great pains to try to educate students and parents about the fact that it’s really part of the Real World, and as such, people should try to protect themselves from crimes through good habits.

Maps of crimes in urban areas are also extremely useful when you’re trying to choose where to live — is your neighborhood potentially a high-crime zone? You might be surprised if you viewed the maps — even peaceful-seeming neighborhoods can contain a lot of problems. Ucrime.com is targeting a valuable niche — the number of universities reporting on its recent launch indicates the level of interest out there for this sort of thing. Just as one might want to check out neighborhoods before moving in, parents could also compare the numbers of crimes reported in and around campuses before sending their children there.

Some individuals from universities have been quick to criticize the new site, however, such as UC Irvine, Boston U and Northeastern. While I’ve no doubt there’s been some amount of errors involved (with the amounts of data from various sources getting aggregated, there has to be), it appears to me that university officials are all to happy to exaggerate and dismiss the site. The main complaint appears to be that crimes outside of university grounds are sometimes reported on the maps.

I actually think it’s desirable to report on crimes within the university grounds as well as in their surrounding areas — it’s a much more accurate indication of the overall area’s crime level and safety. If university officials are dismissive of the site because it’s reporting on some crimes in the immediate area, it’s disingenuous to distract the public with claims of “inaccuracy”. After all, most campuses do not have moats nor walls to keep a criminal from walking across the street onto the grounds.

It’s not surprising, though, that university officials are critical of the site — they have a vested interest in trying to maintain some level of fantasy about the relative safety of their campuses.

My only big criticism is that Ucrime.com needs to expand quite a bit — 200 universities is a good start, but there’s over 800 universities, colleges and trade schools around the U.S. And, I wonder if they’ll be able to obtain crime stats for some of the private institutions?

Oh — I can’t resist a good-natured dig towards my alma mater’s big opponent school!  If you compare the above map of crimes at Texas A&M with a map of crimes at the University of Texas in Austin, you’ll see a really much larger number of crimes pinpointed in Austin:

University of Texas Crimes (click to enlarge)

Ucrime.com’s mashup is a good one, and I imagine the scrutiny post-launch will just help them improve their quality. Universities had better accept quickly that they will not be able to realistically discourage people from looking at those maps, however, and judging the schools on the crime data displayed.

(click to enlarge)

Apparently this Russian town got a crowd of people to don yellow slickers and stand in a large smiley face pattern so that Google Earth and Google Maps could capture them in their next update.

Trick is, the Google Map screen-grab appears to be a very obvious hoax by a blogger dubbed “Heiner Wolf“. According to these photos, people really did turn out to form the smiley face — I would guess as part of a radio station promotion. But this blogger transposed the people onto the Google Maps image of the area. Lame!

There are plenty of instances of messages appearing in Google Maps pics, if you want to see real ones: examples of roof ads, cool things in Google Maps, marriage proposals, and the infamous Swastika Building.

Assumably the special icon is celebrating Google’s 10th Birthday, though there’s no mention of it on the Google Lat Long Blog.

This announcement comes on the heels of explanations a few weeks ago about why Google Maps was missing data for the Georgian Republic. A number of sources on the internet had claimed that Google had yanked map data for Georgia in order to not be facilitating the war that sparked in the region with Russia. Google stated that this was untrue — that the region had never had detailed roads displayed because they didn’t have a good source of information for the area yet. (I was one of the people duped by the spurious claims — surprising, since it’s patently apparent that the Russian military would ALREADY have good maps of their region!)

(click to enlarge)

However, even though it’s great that Google is beefing up their map data, I have to say that publicising it and releasing it as they have done seems terribly precipitate. If you look at the screengrab above, you’ll see that the map data they added is just city name labels — no streets or roads connecting them up — and not even dots or outlines to show where the cities are actually located!

As a former cartographer, I find it ridiculous that they would’ve released more map data in this limited manner. The lack of pinpoints or roads demonstrates just how useless maps can be if there’s insufficient context included. Users cannot adequately make sense of a map in this state, rendering the addition of the city labels pointless.

For example, if you’re glancing at this map at the label for the city of Rustavi, can you tell if the city is above, below, or beside the name label?  Is the label centered over the city? And, the lack of roads connecting the cities is the worst part of all — is there a major road connecting it to T’bilisi, or not?!?

Thirty whacks with a wet noodle for releasing data in such a hasty manner, and then calling attention to the fact by promoting it!

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Street View, Los Angeles.

However, I see a much more immediately valuable use that could be put to text scanned from the images — quality improvement of address pinpointing functionality.

I’ve written before about a number of the causes of errors in maps, and one of the most frequent errors is in how addresses get incorrectly pinpointed down streets. If Google Street View images were scanned for text as Philipp describes, address numbers for businesses and residences could be much more accurately associated with locations.

Street View could be used to improve mapping quality in many areas.

(Click to enlarge – Marry Me Leslie)

Googler Michael Weiss-Malik, a member of the Google Geo Team, planned ahead and stood at the side of the road when the Google Street View pictures were being updated in a drive-by photo shoot. (Read Michael’s explanation of what he did and why.) Google has been aggressively expanding Street View images this summer.

Michael isn’t the first to have a marriage proposal appear in Google Maps. Here’s a few more we’ve collected in the past:

“Will You Marry Me”

“Marry Me, D”

“Thelma, Will U Marry Me?”

Of course, people have also intentionally or unintentionally used Google Maps for communicating commercial promotion or ads — sometimes called “roofvertising“.