Google My Business

» see business.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This is a grave for a product I have never once had a reason to open, and the reason is a role rather than a country. I have never owned a shop. Google My Business was the dashboard where the person who owns the shop goes to correct what Google says about it, which puts it in the small set of things on this site that an ordinary internet user never touches and that a few million small businesses touched every week for eight years.

It launched on 11 June 2014, in 236 regions and 65 languages on the same day, and it existed because Google's own tools for businesses had multiplied into a mess. Places for Business was one dashboard and the Google+ pages dashboard was another, and a restaurant owner had to work out which of the two controlled the phone number appearing beside their name on the map. My Business collapsed both into one page.

What you did in there was small and it mattered enormously. You claimed the listing, which is the part people forget: the listing already existed whether you knew about it or not, assembled by Google out of directories and user submissions, and claiming it was how you got authority over your own opening hours. After that you answered reviews and put up photos. There was also Insights, which told you how many people had searched for you and how many of them had then asked for directions.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the dashboard did ~

For a business with one location and no marketing budget, this was the whole of its internet presence. Plenty of small shops never built a website at all, in Turkey as much as anywhere, because the Google listing already carried the address and the hours, with the photos customers took underneath. The listing was the site. My Business was the admin panel for it.

That is also what made the product uncomfortable. A business can lose control of its own name on the map because somebody else claimed the listing first, or because a competitor filed an edit that stuck, and the way back runs entirely through a Google form. The dashboard was where you fought that out. It was the only door into a record about you that you did not create and cannot delete.

~ the rename ~

On 4 November 2021 Google said the product was now called Google Business Profile, and the reason given was to keep things simple. What it meant in practice is that a single-location business should stop going to a dashboard at all and edit itself from inside Search and Maps, by looking up its own name while signed in. The separate web console survived under the name Business Profile Manager, aimed at chains and at the agencies looking after hundreds of listings.

The app went in July 2022. It came off the Play Store and the App Store, and anyone who still had it installed got a screen telling them to use Maps. Eight years after gathering the tools into one place under a name and an icon, Google scattered them back out into the products they had come from.

~ what it means to not have an app ~

There is a real difference between managing something in its own application and managing it as a panel inside somebody else's. An app is a place you go on purpose, with a version number and a changelog and a thing you can complain about by name. A panel inside Search is a set of buttons that can move or disappear between one week and the next, with nothing left to point at when they do.

That is what the rename actually did. The listing is still there and the tools are mostly still there, and the shop owner is still doing the same work of correcting the hours and answering a bad review from a Tuesday. What went away is the idea that this was a product they had, with a name, rather than a corner of a product that Google has.

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