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/21...b-google-prank

[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.