I’ve been Punk’d. By Google -- they got me good! But ya’know what I want to know? How long has Google been playin’ me? I know it’s been going on for more than just April 1st.

Everyone who runs a website with any level of actual content on it gets emails from complete strangers from time to time. The more frequented your site, the more of this kind of email you get. I’ve been running tikiroom.com in some capacity since 1999, and thanks to the great members of the forum I run on it, it’s got a small bit of content that gets me steady traffic from Google. I get about one or two messages a week from complete strangers asking a variety of tiki-related questions.

A handful of these emails are from truly clueless people. I mean real nimrods. Take this person for example:

Subject: menu
I could not find anything on the internet. I would like to come for my birthday, but I have a daughter that only fried shrimp normal or something with batter on chicken. Can you help by identifying your featured items?

They seem to think I run a restaurant. Now I do know that people on the forum I run talk about restaurants and bars from time to time a lot, but I don’t think anyone could mistake my website for an official restaurant one. Are they simply not reading my site? How could they make that mistake?

Perhaps it’s this. This is what Google gives you when you search for the Tiki Tiki Restaurant by typing tiki tiki richmond:

Notice the “A” entry. It looks like it’s a yellow pages entry for the the Tiki-Tiki on Patterson drive. But look at the domain it lists: www.tikiroom.com. Clicking the link takes you to my forum, where people there are discussing the Tiki-Tiki in Richmond.

I’m always flattered when Google lists my site as A-Number-One for any search query. But is Google going too far with this? Are they misrepresenting me, or the restaurant, by building my site’s link into a yellow-pages-like listing? Doesn’t it look like Google is suggesting my site is the official site for this restaurant? Do I now feel bad for calling that unsuspecting emailer a nimrod? (I can answer that last one: No. But that’s beside the point.) Is Google so confident in their search results that they’re “feeling lucky” and assuming that #1 result in the search must be the official site? It all seems a bit misleading on Google’s part.

This isn’t an isolated incident. I get one to two emails a month from people who are mistaking my site for something else.

I’m still on the fence about whether or not this is a good thing for Google to be doing, and I’m up for hearing what others think. I know there’s a lot of (lame-o) complaints of Google being too powerful and that their search results can affect business, but the information design in this case really makes it look like Google is saying that my site is the official Tiki-Tiki website. And while my site doesn’t slam the restaurant, what if it did? Could Google be held responsible for mis-associating my site with the restaurant in such a misleading way? Could I be in trouble?

Yahoo’s results

So of course I tried the same search in Yahoo to see what they did. I got something that looks very similar at first blush:

But Yahoo’s acts quite differently when you click on the link. You’re taken to a Yahoo-owned yellow-pages site that summarizes the info about the restaurant, including star ratings:

I don’t think Yahoo’s is as misleading as Google’s.

Since discovering Google’s misdirection of people to my site, I’ve been a bit nicer to the people who mistakenly email me. But I still feel a little bit weird about Google associating my website so closely with a map entry, address, and phone number. I don’t think this is a very good move on Google’s part.

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