How’s your 7 pack looking these days?

Nope, I’m not asking you to check out your body in the mirror before you go clubbing, so relax!

If this sounds new to you, the “7-pack” is the term given to the group of business listings returned when you do a search on a keyword term. For example, if I am sweltering in the summer heat and want to go swimming and search on swimming pool I might get the following results.

Google search 7 pack

This is a classic 7 Pack. Some of the listings are for swimming pools, one is for the swim beach at the Lake Loveland, and one is for a business that one presumes services or sells swimming pools. Then there is the School District office which doesn’t have a pool to my knowledge, but some of their schools do so…there you go, not an exact science, but one we are used to.

Google has been experimenting with the 7 pack for several years. Sometimes you will get 7 results, sometimes 10. Other searches will yield 5 listings or only 3.

Map Problem #2

You know how you could click on the “Map results for swimming pool” and it would take you out to Google Maps and provide you with page after page of listings. After I get over the motion sickness this process inevitably induces (but that’s for another story) I can see a few mapped results and then I have to click yet again to get additional listings.

In essence, Google has been making it more cumbersome to get the information we are looking for as consumers!

It used to be if I was looking for someone to clean my pool, repair my pool filter, a place to buy some pool chemicals, or I wanted to install a pool, I could find all of that information by searching on swimming pool. Kind of a one-stop-shop. Cool.

Google map search

So I know we aren’t the swimming pool Mecca of the world here in Loveland, but are there no more than 9 swimming pool related facilities and/or businesses in the area? Because 9 is all that comes up.

I don’t mean in the pack.

I don’t even mean on the first map page.

I mean TOTAL. This is page one…and there are no further pages.

What About a ZERO Pack

Even worse, for lots of terms there are ZERO business listings returned. Lately it seems that more and more are resulting in ZERO listings. What gives with that?

Of course you can try adding more words to  your search, but that is a PITA and why should I have to if it was working before?

Clearly, someone has decided it wasn’t working and they have tried to fix it.

The Problem for Local Business with Fewer Results

Someone has apparently decided that we can’t handle the volume of choices we had before and they have developed a system that gives us fewer results.

It stinks. I want my choices back.

I did a search today looking for a particular service–and 33 results came up. That should be more than enough, right?

It would be except that they were for 3 different companies–in their various locations. Some of the locations are over 50 miles away.

That is not local. At least not in my town.

So Google–fix this fiasco! When I’m searching for a local service, I want local. I am not going to drive to Denver to find it when I know I can get it here. And I certainly do not need a listing of every single store in a chain. Not helpful.