New interface to model Business Listings and Buildings to improve data input into Google Places

[Lori Savageau]

Dear Google Map Maker users,

Over the past year, we have been working to create a more robust pipeline for adding and improving business listings on Google Map Maker. In order to ensure that edits to business listings in Map Maker are reflected more reliably on Google Maps and Google Plus Local Pages, we are going to release some user interface changes over the next few days that will change how business listings are edited on Map Maker. This change will address issues several of you have reported with edits to business listing attributes at times not rendering on Maps.

In particular, Map Maker is going to completely separate buildings from the businesses within them, and will no longer allow business listing points to be converted to a building shape or vice versa. Note that we have had a moderation policy to differentiate buildings that contain more than one business listing for some time, but have now incorporated this policy into the Map Maker user interface so that users will more intuitively add business and building data in this manner. This approach will let Map Maker separate out abstract entities, such as businesses, from physical entities, like buildings, and allows us to combine Map Maker data more correctly with data from Google Places, such as reviews, photos, etc.

In preparation for this release, we need to make some automated changes to existing data that will split business listings data from buildings data into two separate features. These automatic changes are based on heuristics, rules that were algorithmically derived by analyzing large volumes of data in Map Maker. While we have spent a long time fine-tuning these heuristics, it is possible that we may still see a few cases of incorrect splitting. If you find any such cases, please let us know, with a link to any examples, so that we may take a look and try to fix those cases.

Here are the changes that you can expect to see over the next few days:

1. Existing business listings that have a building polygon associated with it will be automatically split into a separate business listing point and building shape. You will see these edits made by a user named “Google Automated Building POI Transformer”.
2. These building shapes will not be allowed to have any business attributes, such as phone number or email addresses, associated with it.
3. The new Map Maker user interface will disallow adding a building shape to a business listings, but will allow users to link a business to the building that it occupies.

These changes are expected to be launched within the next few days. Stay tuned as we publish further details, with screenshots, on the modified user interface and update the help center for this launch.

Thanks,

Lori, Map Maker Community Manager
on behalf of:
Piyush Janawadkar and Aneesh Naman
Software Engineers
The Google Map Maker Team