What happens on Google Maps in a Plus/Frommers/Zagat notspot?

NB: This is a viewpoint by Nathan Midgley, writer and web editor who has been living in Ghana for the last two years. You can accuse Google of many things, but not lack of ambition. Mountain View calls its updated Maps product "a map for every person and place". With the ability to find things that interest you in a given area - food, attractions, shops - and guide you to them, Maps increasingly looks that way. But how well does its ability to ‘read’ the world really travel? Taking the search giant at its word, I tried relocating some of the searches from its Maps publicity to the capital of Ghana. Where’s the beef? The Maps trailer that followed Google I/O focused on searches for burgers and steak in San Francisco. When you get your hands on the real thing, the introductory tour invites you to search for sushi in Boston. Technically it’s great, but finding popular food in wealthy, well-connected US metropolitan areas is an easy win. I decided to punch in "Sushi, Accra" and see how the new Maps performs outside its comfort zone. There's a small but varied crop of restaurants here, most of them indexed online in some form or another. That makes strange omissions very easy to spot. Initially I get the same results as in "classic" Google Maps: only 3121 Sushi, a bar and restaurant in the Osu area.

Pretty poor. There is no sign of Chase, Monsoon or Santoku - and Santoku is arguably the most prestigious restaurant of any kind in the city. It also takes the third spot for "sushi, accra" in straight search. In classic Maps, it is still possible to find those places. "See more results" brings up the familiar seven-pack of Google Places/+Local hits labelled A-G. Monsoon is at D, Santoku at C and Chase at B - albeit mislabelled as Delifrance, which has a concession inside.

Now the seven-pack link has gone. Google knows results B-G are there, but Maps has raised its threshold for usefulness, and they fall beneath it. SearchEngineLand calls it "continuing the trend of reducing additional consumer choices as 'unnecessary clutter'". Though well-intended, this leaves us with some pretty iffy information. The sushi example is not a one-off:

• "Pizza, Accra" misses wood-fired pizzeria Mamma Mia, rated the city's #2 restaurant overall on TripAdvisor with 152 reviews. Bella Roma, which for my money is better, is missing too.
• "French food, Accra" finds only Le Tandem, missing La Chaumiere (#7 overall), Le Must, Livingstone Safari and Le Magellan.
• "Indian food, Accra" finds only Kohinoor, missing Tandoor (#8 overall), Heritage (#16) and Khana Khazana. "Curry, Accra" returns no results at all.
• "Waakye, Accra" returns only Soma Waakye Joint. It misses - among countless others - legendary celeb-magnet Auntie Muni, which gets the top result in straight SERPs and has a Google-hosted website.

You get the idea. I happen to think that those TripAdvisor rankings came from the back end of a horse, but they collectively demonstrate that content and opinion on the city's restaurants is out there. Unfortunately it isn't published by someone that Mountain View gets on with. And there's the rub. Out here, our dining options are being warped by the limited range of inputs Maps now recognises. Nothing to go on Google's strategic goals have seen Maps give increasing weight to content from Places/+Local, which has low consumer penetration and vanishingly low business penetration here. Where listings exist they are usually unverified and incomplete. Contact details or opening hours may be missing. Reviews and photos are scant. Maps is also factoring in content from Google acquisitions Frommers and Zagat. Good luck with that: Frommers only covers nine countries in the whole of Africa. On the mainland it covers just seven, none of them in the west. And Zagat? Forget about it. With input from approved sources either limited or entirely absent, Maps is effectively reading Accra’s restaurant businesses with a very dumb keyword search. It is like going back in time: in most cases, only places with the exact cuisine or dish you want in their name show up. Hence 3121 Sushi. Back in Boston, restaurants don't have to be quite so literal to be discovered. Oishii and Douzo both appear, thanks to far meatier local listings - a verified page, comprehensive contact details, loads of user reviews and some content from Zagat.

So while the new Maps does deliver better results in places like Boston, it has the potential to deliver worse ones in the many places where signals from Zagat and Google+/Local are weak. That is, let's face it, quite a lot of the world. This causes strange inversions. In Boston, Santoku would be the first place professional reviewers checked out, and it would be flooded with G+ write-ups and user photos. Maps ends up missing not a tiny ramshackle operation but the ne plus ultra. Classic gave us a potential workaround, but with the degradation of the seven-pack the problem now seems set in stone. To some extent, it is reasonable to blame businesses for failing to keep up. Google has done some hard, face-to-face work to sell and explain its services here, but both restaurants and diners remain stuck to word-of-mouth and a cluster of local directories. On the other hand, Accra is still struggling towards official, systematised street addressing. A local listing can be hard to complete if you genuinely don't have a full address. And for those taking their first steps into tech literacy, a grasp of the Places/+Local/Google+/Maps pile-up is a big ask. They helped you build a Get Your Business Online site during last year’s big push. They assured you this was your first-class ticket to the internet. You have to do what else now? Time may iron out those problems - perhaps with the help of Map Maker and, er, Google-branded wifi blimps. For now, hungry folks in this corner of the world are slightly better off on classic Maps, and far better off on TripAdvisor. NB: This is a viewpoint by Nathan Midgley, writer and web editor who has been living in Ghana for the last two years.