Restaurant sues Google

That's frustrating for the restaurant owner, but in this day and age, every business needs to pay attention to their online presence.

Would be interesting to follow this case could either open the floodgates or not. Depends what Googles defaults are and how secure they make editing a listing (not very from most experiences)

Good luck to the owner

I think it servers Google right! They have NO business scraping data and creating listings for businesses and I'm willing to bet that's exactly what happened and then they got the data wrong!

Of course Google is going to call it a meritless claim because then they'd be admitting to wronging many hundreds if not thousands of businesses.

If it were me I'd argue that Google harmed their own users by not providing the correct information which thus ruined their users experience which thereby damaged the restaurant.

This would be an interesting case to follow.

Great example why all business owners need an Internet/Social Media Marketing Consultant.

It's easy to say the business owner should have seen this coming/had a social media consultant/what have you. But this problem has been coming. Google are determined to give you the answers to things these days on their own site, rather than taking you to the relevant site.

The problem is that they seem to lack quality controls. How did they confirm anyone making changes to opening hours was the owner? They didn't. But they were happy to have the details of opening hours on their own site because it kept them as being the "answer shop" to people's questions, instead of sending them to the true authority on the subject (the website of the owner, if they had one - I say if they have one as I read the article yesterday and now the link doesn't seem to be working so I can't check, just gives a "Yahoo engineers are trying to fix this")

Now that is a business opportunity for people, being the consultants who can fix these problems, or solve it before it happens. But that doesn't mean that Google shouldn't be made to answer for their lack of quality control.

This is another wonderful moment that went a bit viral...

Tweet Showing How Google Itself Is A "Scraper Site" Goes Massively Viral

I like Google for many reasons, but they, in my opinion, are playing with fire by making themselves an answer site by giving answers on their own pages, and lacking the quality control to be able to do so well.

This is also a great example on why it's extremely important for EVERY business owner to have iniatives in place to capture information of their current customers so they can continue to follow up and market to them in the future.

If this restaurant had captured the email, phone numbers (text message marketing), and addresses of their customers they could have sent out some messages to get their customers back and also find out why their weekend sales diminished like they did.

Since we're talking about Google using it's searches to provide answers rather than showing authoratitive sources, this one might interest

Looks Like Google Hates "Jersey Boys" Just As Much As The Film "America"

There's a few differences, but it again shows that their use of their own site to answer questions is problematic. There are probably more than a few legal cases to answer - cases they've opened up by being an "answer" site rather than just linking to places that have answers,

That OP article/link is a joke.

What did the business owner do to stay in business before 1998? Did he use Google in 1974?

Just read the story, that's crazy, definitely a case to follow!

AND they're located 20 minutes from my house, interesting...

Let's say it makes it to court... Can you imagine the resources Google has to hire the best of the best? Talk about the ultimate David and Goliath matchup.

Very true, Matt, BUT imagine if they win!
Also the negative publicity can be very damaging to Google, despite their size. That can be very hard to control once it happens. Settling out of court may be prudent for Google to do.