Restaurants in Pleasanton, CA

Notice something a bit off about the above Google Maps result for “restaurants in Pleasanton, CA”?

How about this one?

Hotels in Pleasanton, CA

Either Pleasanton just annexed San Francisco or the historic Hotel Whitcomb has some hardcore shuttle service.

Update: I have only been able to replicate this in these two categories plus “motels”, “dining”, “rooms”, etc.  My guess is this is only happening for categories that are associated with Hotel Whitcomb which makes me think there is some sort of The Shining thing happening over there.

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4 Response Comments

  • Mike Blumenthal  June 9, 2008 at 6:32 pm

    Well it might be the Shining, although I always look at these as opportunities to better understand Google’s ranking algo which I guess you could say is sort of like the…..oh yea, the Shining.

    But I noticed that they had:

    Website‎ – Directions‎ – Virtual Tour‎ – Video‎

    listed with their record. I had never seen these video or video virtual tours from showhotel.com before.

    Mike

  • martijn  June 11, 2008 at 4:20 am

    These things happen all the time when use Google Maps for the Netherlands. I really don’t know why but I have some theories on this:

    – the country is just too small :p
    – Google NL doesn’t cooperate with enough business providers to have a thorough and complete set of business listings to come up with something related.
    – In this case the ‘authority’ part of the algorithm exceeds the proximity part of the algorithm.

    for example;
    my employer is listed on a business directory which google scrapes for information. A different company get’s listed along our company results in the google map results while searching for our brand name. After a short research I found out that in the business directory they share the same ‘page’ with many others, (the O in the alphabet). This seems like name clashing (in our case, of the first three letters ).

  • gwen  June 11, 2008 at 12:56 pm

    Keep in mind where you want to go or you might be crossing a river where there is no bridge.