Adding Restaurant in Google Maps

 Add my restau­rant in Google Maps. I found out there were two things I could do – add it as a Local Busi­ness via Google Maps, or use Google Mapmaker.

Adding Local Busi­ness to Google Maps

After log­ging in to my Google Account, Google Maps let me add a busi­ness list­ing from the left side­bar itself.

I could cor­rect the loca­tion marker posi­tion eas­ily by drag­ging it on the map. After enter­ing all the rel­e­vant details like con­tact infor­ma­tion, restau­rant details, etc., I am done. Now comes the funny part – how does Google ver­ify that I am indeed the owner of this business?

Never in my wildest dreams did I imag­ine that Google – the sym­bol of our high-tech age, the epit­ome of cloud com­put­ing – will send me a post­card via snail mail! I get a radio but­ton (option but­ton) but there’s no other way to choose. Can’t they ver­ify sim­ply by call­ing up on the tele­phone num­bers I’ve provided?!

So now, I’ve to wait for “2–3 weeks”, and after receiv­ing the PIN via snail mail, I get to ver­ify and add my list­ing. I remem­ber the last time I had to reg­is­ter for Inter­net Bank­ing after open­ing a bank account in India!
Curi­ously, there’s a nice lit­tle fea­ture that’s not promi­nent while using the Local Busi­ness Cen­ter site – Coupons! Coupons are not as pop­u­lar in India as in the US, but because of the boom­ing IT sec­tor and entry of multi­na­tional (read Amer­i­can) pizza-majors, they’re gain­ing wide­spread even if lim­ited use. Using Google’s Coupons, you can add a few lines of text, set an expi­ra­tion date, and you’re good to go. Neat stuff.

Adding to Google Mapmaker

Adding to Google Map­maker is sim­pler. Google Map­maker seems to have a Wikipedian con­tent author­ing and mod­er­at­ing system.

After adding all the details, I now await for the mod­er­a­tor to approve my entry. Phew, no snail mail this time!
Now, I won­der if there is any­thing like Google Ana­lyt­ics to find out how many ‘hits’ my restau­rant had on Google Maps – that would really be an inter­est­ing proposition…



                                                                                             -PAVANKUMAR JOSHI