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