hutcheson - 1:47 am on Aug 15, 2010 (gmt 0)  I've probably done
more local searches than most webmasters, and Google local
searches had been being gamed to death.  To pick a specific
example: search for, say, businesses in a particular large-
rural-village/small-farm-town in the Lutheran belt--
distinguished only by a tiny Lutheran seminary--and get
thousands of hits for "free-for-all" (i.e. visitor-built")
"directories." Looking for gay pet manicurists in
Malechthonburg? No problem, there's a page where YOU can insert
YOUR very own pet-pedicure businesses for people who care what
their pedicurists do off-shift. And literally thousands of
equally-relevant directories with equally-empty pages (while, so
far as I can tell, the number of actual businesses with websites
in that town can be counted on the fingers of one hand. ONE.
MAYBE, two. Certainly not three, absent a MAJOR chainsaw
accident.)  A change like this would have made a world of
difference for real users, like me, in real searches, like that.
Death t