Why Is It Crate & Barrel Knows But Google & Groupon & Bing Don’t Have A Clue?

The most serious threats to individual community brands and identities right now appear to be Google and Groupon. You can throw Bing in with them. All three of these geographically-challenged giants couldn’t truly find “local” even if they used both hands.

So how is it that in the first image in this blog of something I received this week, Crate & Barrel obviously knows exactly where I live, Durham NC?

Even with all of the algorithms and a mapping ability that show me driveway, the so-called “localness” of Google, Groupon and Bing can’t even come to finding my right metro area, let along my city?

All three, as shown in the snippets below, claim to know my location but then divert me as though I were living in “Raleigh” or at best, if I drill down, at the jointly owned airport, located midway between…but never in Durham? Groupon doesn’t even list Durham just automatically throws me into Raleigh.

This defeats the purpose of “local” and qualifies for a serious “truth in advertising” investigation to tally all of the damages this is causing Durham businesses and Durham as a community.

“C’mon man!” as they say on Sports Center, you need to do better than that. Stop using antiquated and obsolete DMA databases used for 60 year old broadcast television technology that can’t zero in any closer than 22 counties and three states and get back to the technologies that distinguish the Internet.

To make things worse, these three giants can’t then be troubled with DMA’s that are polycentric so they just dumb us down to being centered into Raleigh, giving that city and its businesses a huge advantage to the disadvantage of other places.

As shown in the images below in snippets I captured from Durham from my computer. Google loves to scroll Raleigh info across the top of my Durham Gmail. Groupon brags about being local but gives me instead the name of the airport and then when I click through puts me right in the center of Raleigh. Bing similarly brags about being local, then shows me instead living right in the center of Raleigh.

See snippets below for yourself. Somebody needs to crack the genius up the side of the head who made this mess and get back to year 1637 and the “Cartesian” x and y axes that have made the Internet so accurate and powerful.