The Dude's Fish Store

[sGroup]

Anyone else see Matt Cutt's blog post this morning?

www*mattcutts*com/blog/more-yahoo-strangeness/

Appearantly the new Yahoo maps have Google's address down as "The Dude's Fish Store." He seems to think its some Yahoo engineers have fun, but I think it's originally internally from Google.

Does anyone know if you have to verify addresses when creating a Yahoo Store?

[SwizzleSkids]

There's definately something "fishy" going on here. Doing a search for "the dude's fish shop" in yahoo brings us to this Yahoo Local page:

http://tinyurl.com/dmplx

Where there is a suspicously verbose review. Then on to the actual store itself:
http://ca.local.yahoo.biz/thedudesfishstore/index.html
where there is a picture of cheese featured on the homepage.

So is this a prank on Yahoo's end or Google's end? Or neither?

[sGroup]

Looks like G is testing to find out where Y is getting the adderss for Y-map and or planning a G-Store.

[SwizzleSkids]

Well - Yahoo appears to have noticed the chatter and has removed the listing and the review from the "local" listings.

However - the store itself is still up. One of the commenters on Matt's original blog post says this:

So it looks like you can create a Yahoo! local account - and put in anything you like…. and then it ends up in maps…..

:)

So you could set up “Matt’s SEO Service” at 1600 Ampitheatre Parkway” and compete with The Dude’s Fish store…

Interesting....I think I will create a yahoo store with yahoo's address and call it "Google Wannabe, Inc."

By the way - I called the phone number listed on The Dude's Fish Store's website, and got a google employee - he wouldn't say why he created the store - if it was on his own time or G's time. I suggest calling and leaving messages asking fish questions... :-)

[vlad7]

The Dude's Fish Store
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2145699/yahoo-turns-numb-google-prank :D

[sGroup]

yup..........................

[hulkster]

FYI FWIW: I had a discussion with someone at Yahoo (who is in a position to know) and he said this was the result of some web scraping tools that picked up some bogus info - i.e. it was not an intentional prank, although that would have been funnier.