Google Business Websites (business.site, negocio.site) are turned off

hfs · 2024-03-07T08:47:48.738Z

Google offered free business listing websites as part of their Maps offering. These were domains ending in .business.site or .negocio.site.

The service has been turned off on 2024-03-05. See

support.google.com

Websites made with Google Business Profiles are turned off - Google Business...

As of March 5, 2024, websites made with Google Business Profiles are no longer available and customers that visit your site will be redirected to your Business Profile instead. Learn how to find your

For now these URLs redirect to the Google Maps business profile. On 2024-06-10 they are announced to be shut down completely and to return a 404 Not Found.

As of today, we have about 16,000 objects with a website or contact:website tag containing business.site or negocio.site.

Maybe you would like to check the POIs in your area and check if they have a proper, alternative website, or a social profile one could link to instead (using contact:facebook, contact:instagram and so on). Here’s an Overpass query which you can run for your map area:

overpass-turbo.eu

overpass turbo

A web based data mining tool for OpenStreetMap which runs any kind of Overpass API query and shows the results on an interactive map.

Update: Here’s a MapRoulette challenge to replace or remove these URLs:

MapRoulette: Replace Google Business Websites (business.site, negocio.site)

If you would like to do your own analysis, here’s an Overpass query to list all affected objects worldwide:

overpass-turbo.eu

overpass turbo

A web based data mining tool for OpenStreetMap which runs any kind of Overpass API query and shows the results on an interactive map.

o_andras · 2024-03-07T11:49:43.672Z

I’m assuming that Google owns/owned business.site and negocio.site. Is this true?

Do these sites really need any special treatment? They redirect to GMaps now, why not just remove them? We can check if a given site redirects to GMaps, or doesn’t exist anymore, before removing.

And here’s an idea: providing the affected businesses with an alternative. It’d be good PR for OSM.

CaldeiraG · 2024-03-07T12:49:17.101Z

I’m guessing so yes, registar says so

I’ve started removing some after reading this but the MapComplete quest sounds good to me, especially if you can retrieve an alternative way to contact a business

That would be awesome

jimkats · 2024-03-07T14:01:25.077Z

Thanks for the heads up, I know quite some businesses here in Greece which have such website as official, but barely use.

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-03-07T16:02:52.228Z

Some of the former business.site sites are archived on the Wayback Machine. This is helpful if you encounter a shop with a common name and are unsure which similarly named Facebook page to replace it with, but don’t want to rely on information on Google Maps proper to distinguish between them.

hfs · 2024-03-08T07:47:37.658Z

o_andras:

I’m assuming that Google owns/owned business.site and negocio.site. Is this true?

Yes.

o_andras:

Do these sites really need any special treatment? They redirect to GMaps now, why not just remove them? We can check if a given site redirects to GMaps, or doesn’t exist anymore, before removing.

Removing all these links mechanically is easy and could still be done later, let’s say in a year.

I expect the shop owners need some time to realize what happened and set up an alternative website, if they care.

Just removing the dead link doesn’t add helpful information for users. Getting redirected to Google Maps is better than nothing for the time being. Once all the links become dead in June, we should try to systematically replace them with links to alternative websites, social media profiles, or finally remove them if we can’t find alternatives.

o_andras · 2024-03-08T12:07:20.097Z

hfs:

Getting redirected to Google Maps is better than nothing for the time being.

Debatable, but I don’t have the time to shave yaks as seems to be the current norm around here.

hfs:

Once all the links become dead in June, we should try to systematically replace them with links to alternative websites, social media profiles, or finally remove them if we can’t find alternatives.

You probably mean “Before” rather than “Once” I suppose? You MapRoulette idea sounds like a good plan.

hfs · 2024-03-09T18:40:59.048Z

I‘ve created the MapRoulette challenge:

maproulette.org

MapRoulette

Be an instant contributor to the world’s maps.

citrula · 2024-03-10T05:36:11.235Z

I checked a few of these locally (Texas, US) using your overpass query. It’s a shame that these links are getting broken by Google since around half of the businesses I checked have no “permanent” online presence other than this

eisa01 · 2024-03-10T08:27:11.726Z

Isn’t it premature to clean these up? From the business point of view, it still kind of works, so while they may be working on a replacement it’s not yet ready?

hfs · 2024-03-11T11:26:21.670Z

I let myself convince by o_andras that we should start with the cleanup rather than wait.

Google announced the sunsetting of this service in January 2024. I don‘t know if the affected were notified directly, though. If business didn’t care enough or didn’t have the expertise to set up a replacement website in the past 2 months I don’t have high hopes that they will manage in the remaining 3 months.

What we can do is to save the list of affected OSM objects as of 2024-03-05. Then 6 or 12 months later one can check which of these are still without a website or social media profile and whether one has become available in the meantime.

hfs · 2024-03-22T00:20:32.952Z

Here’s the list of objects that went into the MapRoulette challenge:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/hfs/815314fa43be9452af67d85b4a6302a1

maproulette_challenge_43970_initial_objects.tsv

type	id
node	11705102975
node	11704024977
node	11704000914
node	11697920745
node	11694819727
node	11691996416
node	11691957750
node	11691635289
node	11691612625

This file has been truncated. show original

And here’s an Overpass query to show all objects from above list which don’t have a website, contact:website or a social media contact:*. If you’re interested you can use the query to check if theses businesses have a replacement website a few months down the road.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hfs/d4e1b85690a03e96f1dbfdc427634b71/raw/Overpass_Google_Business_still_no_website.oql