Are Local Search Results Polluted With Bad Content?

[Linda Buquet]

Was just reading a post that brought up a good question that I had never really thought about much.
Odd - since I "live and breathe" local search. Alex Salkever over at Streetfight wrote:

<a href="http://streetfightmag.com/2012/08/29/why-are-local-search-results-polluted-with-bad-content/">Why Are Local Search Results Polluted With Bad Content?</a>

Which leads me to ask — why are local search results for everything except restaurants and hotels so polluted with bad content? Let me give you an example. When I search for a doctor, I get at least four or five listings for various health ratings sites. The sites usually have very few ratings, and its hard to tell if the ratings are reliable. The sites usually don’t provide me with particularly useful or relevant information about how hard it is to get in to see that doctor, where the doctor practices, and what their sub-specialities are. And there is rarely a social graph overlay to help me find out if trusted peers and friends had gone to that doctor.

Read the rest here.

I think in his post, Alex is primarily talking about the local ORGANIC listings because he talks a lot about the directory listings that show up.

The reason his question kind of hit me funny, is I just realized my brain is so focused on local PINNED results, the G+ Local results, that I don't even really pay much attention to organic, unless I'm specifically looking to see where someone ranks that is having a problem OR trying to reverse engineer the algo.

Actually now that I think about it my whole view of local is somewhat skewed (or screwed?) because I'm almost always helping people with a problem, so am usually viewing local results more like a detective, zeroed in on the problem at hand.

I just realized I seldom use local as a consumer does, just looking for local businesses.
And I also seldom really tune into the organic local results that much either.

So the question is how good/bad do you think local results are in general?
Do you agree they are polluted with bad content?

I guess I never really thought of local results as being bad or polluted.
What do you think? Weigh in below...