Last weekend I was Fresno with my family, relying completely on my trusty Droid to conduct life. Living in the bay area, I got used to relying on Google maps without a second thought. So I tried to find restaurants in Fresno using Google. For saturday lunch, I was looking for a Mexican restaurant, and picked one randomly from the ones google suggested. Restaurant name: Rocio’s Mexican Restaurant. When we drove to the destination following their directions, it turned out to be a lousy part of town, and there was no restaurant there. Fortunately it was during the day.  I would have hated to end up in that part of the town after dark.

Same story repeated for Sunday lunch. This time we looked for a Chinese restaurant, and followed the directions to their top result for the search. Restaurant name: Golden Dynasty. Result: we ended up bang in the middle of a residential neighborhood with no restaurant in sight. Needless to say that my wife has lost all confidence in the Droid’s navigational system, although she does not equate it to google yet.  It would be an interesting brand experiment to see what her reaction is if she maps the source of the poor results to google.

In contrast, I looked up restaurant information on Yelp. The usage mode is of course a little bit different, so it’s not an apples to apples comparison -- but they got it right. Yelp’s data is clearly superior to Google’s. Perhaps Google had a good reason to try to acquire Yelp. I think Microsoft should try to take Yelp away from Google’s grasp while they are still independent. That may give their local search a leg up over Google in terms of data quality. Of course I do not know if Yelp has a long term dedicated set of contributors that will continue to produce high quality data.

To make things worse, I was trying to meet up with a friend on Tuesday at the Borders in Milpitas just off McCarthy Blvd. I followed the GPS directions from work – about 5 miles away from the destination. Towards the end of the trip, Google guided me in the wrong direction. Luckily the store was already in sight. Perplexed, I drove past the store and tried the nav system from the opposite direction. Same result – Google once again sent me off in the wrong direction. Now my faith in the google maps is sufficiently shaken where I would probably verify their directions with another source before heading out. Kind of defeats one of the two main reasons I got the Droid – the built-in turn-by-turn directions.

These are certainly difficult search problems, and I doubt that this is an area that a startup can explore. But someone may come up with a better approach to tackling the problem.

To local data providers: Based on my Fresno experience, it is important to know something about the neighborhood for out-of-towners. It would be a useful additional field of information.