Technically, Google seems to have finally gotten it: whoever wants to win over the middle-class has to work for it. Somehow, the idea has caught on that the world doesn’t belong to Google, as a new “service-offensive” shows.

Google has apparently realized that just the fact that small and midsized companies can register themselves by Places won’t necessarily arouse much enthusiasm. Only about four million firms worldwide are using the classifieds for the search engine giant and about hald of them are in the USA. In addition, among the four million is a load of spam.

As David Mihm reported in his blog, Mountain View has commissioned a number of operators to verify the Places entries, which has caused for quite a bit of confusion. When the called parties are asked to verify their contact information, the most frequent response is: “sorry, I’m not authorized to give out that information.” As you could imagine, there are many people that aren’t too thrilled with the situation. After all, who knows if the person on the other end of the line isn’t just some money hungry data-collector posing as a Google rep.

Mihn definitely makes a couple of good points about this great idea being burnt out due to an unprofessional application. Especially small businesses value the whole love and care effect, which helped German phonebook publishers win over their customers. Even Yelp’s solution is a great alternative: for quite a few months, there is a firm council where small businesses congress with the website to develop and improve concepts and new ideas.

The most interesting point is that Google is still weak in the local search area. Even its initiatives in 2009, especially Places and the under development check-in world, managed to disguise itself as completed homework. But such failures as the telephone act allows us to have our doubts as to whether or not Google will be able to take a step down from its golden throne and come down to the real world. Others have managed, such as Yelp. But they’re no longer on Google’s shopping list…