Local listings: Where do they come from?

As many of you know, a local listing is often created by including data from multiple sources. We do our best to give attribution to the data appearing on a local listing. Here's a rundown of our main sources of data and how it appears in a listing:

LBC: Local Business Center. Information submitted and verified as individual listings appears with the label Provided by business owner. Also, some feeds are submitted through the LBC.

YP: Yellow Pages. This describes information we get from public directories created and licensed from 3rd parties. In some areas, we provide attribution at the bottom of a list of results (e.g., business listings distributed by YellowPages.ca™).

EC: Enhanced Content, which can include reviews, photos, business hours, payment methods, and other details. This is provided to us via feeds from other websites. If this information is coming from a published web page, a link will be provided.

UGC + WEB: User Generated Content & other websites. Both these sources are either submitted to Google directly or crawled, just like other websearch results. If the content is hosted on a website, we'll provide a link. Otherwise, you'll see a Provided by Google users label that shows it was submitted using our community features.

Joel Headley, Google Maps team