I assume most of you have been seeing all the buzz around Google Maps showing racists search results. We covered it a lot at Search Engine Land and Google has issued an apology last night blaming crowdsourcing and Googlebombing for it.

In short, Google Maps said they use terms in online discussions of the places in their database. So if people call a specific place as being tasty or great customer service or in these cases, very offensive terms, and it happens a lot, Google has picked it up as so descriptive that it let queries that match the term return that place in the Google Maps results. This is like Googlebombing and Google promises to fix it.

Here are some examples:

Here is a new example from @Th3Dir3ctorY:

The list goes on and on.

Here is Google’s apology:

So I’d expect the traffic change some for many local businesses in the near future. I hope it is not a big impact but I doubt this change will go unnoticed for some businesses.

Forum discussion at Google+.