Road maps, restaurant guides, the Yellow Pages ... the ‘geoweb’ has supplanted them all. But whether you use Google Maps or Yelp to find what you need, a closer look reveals that our digital urban mirror is full of chinks and distortions

To hear Carlos Castaño tell it, Los Chuzos y Algo Mas, the small eatery he manages on the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 79th Street in Queens, New York, is world-famous. “Not just here, or in New Jersey or Miami,” he says, waving past the elevated train tracks in the vague direction of Latin America. “When I say hamburger, you think about McDonald’s, right? When people say chuzos, they think about 79th Street.” (A chuzo is Colombia’s answer to the kebab.)

On the internet, however, Los Chuzos – a 24-year-old grilled meat and fresh juice counter owned by Castaño’s brother – wears a cloak of modern anonymity: it’s not on Google Maps. The same is true of J&C Delicias, a Colombian restaurant a few steps down 79th Street, and Jeri’s Shim Myung Do, a martial arts school one block east. Olympya Beauty Salon, on Roosevelt off 78th Street, doesn’t have any internet footprint at all.

This neighbourhood, Jackson Heights, is a place where the commercial landscape confounds the vast reach of internet cartography. Many regular storefront businesses on Roosevelt Avenue are hard or impossible to find online. The challenge increases for the tax advisers, lawyers and medical professionals on the second or third floors. It goes without saying that any off-the-books establishment, from a taco cart or a sidewalk clothier to the truly illegal trades like drugs and prostitution, leaves little trace on the web.

This divergence would have been unremarkable only a few years ago. But in that time, the internet’s geospatial resources, or the “geoweb”, have developed enough intricacy, sophistication and responsiveness to become an indispensable consumer tool. Just as, in an earlier generation of the internet, Craigslist obliterated the utility of printed classified ads, so the geoweb has supplanted road maps, restaurant guides and the Yellow Pages. Whether you want a pizza or a plumber, your search likely begins on a keyboard or touchscreen.

In short, we now use the geoweb as though it were a perfect reflection of our world: 97% of US internet users, according to Google, look for local products and services online. A closer look, though, reveals that our digital mirror bears chinks and subtle distortions. Some businesses exploit loopholes to advance their virtual prominence. Others are obscured through their own ignorance. Still others don’t appear on the internet at all.

That information bias permeates the internet is not news, of course. The amount of indexed Google Maps content per person is as much as 100 times greater in Scandinavia than in the Middle East or Central America; Tokyo has more geospatial data than Africa.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A busy retail street in Accra, Ghana. There is more geospatial digital data available for the city of Tokyo than for all of Africa. Photograph: Ulrich Doering/Alamy

But this effect is also evident within a city. Search Paris under Yelp’s “hotwords” program for brasserie, and you’ll fine a virtual absence of the word in peripheral residential neighbourhoods like the 15th and 20th arrondissements. Google reveals those neighbourhoods to be as flush with steak-frites as any – but gourmands aren’t writing about them online.

Even in places where companies like Yelp, Bing and Google portray the commercial streetscape with perfect precision, search results are shaped by algorithms; the geoweb responds to each query with a fresh and limited permutation from its index. A husband and wife can receive different suggestions for Chinese food based not only on their choice of search engine, but their own search history. In effect, they see two different cities – try it with a friend!

“There’s no such thing as a true map,” says Mark Graham, a senior research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute. “Every single map is a misrepresentation of the world, every single map is partial, every single map is selective. And every single map tells a particular story from a particular perspective.”

Because online maps are in constant flux, though, it’s hard to plumb the bias in the cartography. Graham has found that the language of a Google search shapes the results, producing different interpretations of Bangkok and Tel Aviv for different residents. “The biggest problem is that we don’t know,” he says. “Everything we’re getting is filtered through Google’s black box, and it’s having a huge impact not just on what we know, but where we go, and how we move through a city.”

As an example of the mapmaker’s authority, Matt Zook, a collaborator of Graham’s who teaches at the University of Kentucky, demonstrated what happens when you perform a Google search for abortion: you’re led not just to abortion clinics and services but to organisations that campaign against it. “There’s a huge power within Google Maps to just make some things visible and some things less visible,” he notes.

Last year, Google researchers found that only 55% of small businesses in the US had a website, while 19% had no online presence at all. With its new platform Google My Business, the company hopes to make it easier for small businesses to establish themselves online. Claiming or adding an online business listing is as simple as searching for it and verifying by phone or post.

“Businesses who are in big cities sometimes think that they can get most of their business from foot traffic, that their customer will walk past the store every day,” says James Croom, head of marketing for Google My Business. “I’ve spoken to a lot of them, and sometimes their view is, ‘Well, actually, I don’t need a website. I don’t need to get online because people just walk down the street and find me.”

The data in the large says otherwise. The 97% of internet users who search for local shops and services are acting on the results. Three-quarters of mobile searches trigger “follow-up actions” like more research, a phone call or a visit — two per search, on average. Fully half of smartphone users visit a store within a day of their search (on PCs and tablets, it’s slightly over a third).

“Effectively, every consumer – especially in urban areas – is using digital search to find businesses,” says Damian Rollison, a vice president at Universal Business Listing, a company that helps small businesses increase their online presence.

Failure in the digital realm can beget real-world losses. In Virginia, a former restaurateur who doesn’t own a computer sued Google, unsuccessfully, after discovering that his listing had mistakenly said he was closed on the weekends. That restaurant, the Serbian Crown, closed last year – a victim of online sabotage, its owner insists, a claim that was in no way substantiated by the judge.

Because a business can live or die on the strength of its digital footprint, a whole industry has emerged to offer what’s called “local search engine optimisation”. SEO Works, an Australian company, charges $1,990 (£1,315) for a four-week “Google Maps package,” with a subsequent maintenance plan for $1,190 (£787). There are simpler options, too: the start-up Moz Local will maintain an online listing for $84 (£55) a year, updating basic information such as opening hours on Google or Yelp. (For the record, it is free for businesses to claim and tend these listings themselves – and just as easy on Yelp or Apple as on Google.)

As the influence of the geoweb grows, so does its appeal to transgressors. In January 2014, someone hijacked thousands of local hotel listings, redirecting them to the hotel-booking website Roomstobook.info (and two others with similar names). Companies like charter buses, teeth whiteners, cosmetic surgeons and strip clubs caught posting fake reviews have settled with state governments for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Certain industries have particularly low reputations. Local lawyers have proved notorious for hijacking local searches, providing misleading information to increase their digital prominence. “If you dig into these results what you’ll find is that half of them have fake names and a third of them aren’t really located where they say they are,” says Mike Blumenthal, a local SEO consultant.

Abusive florists were weeded out, while the locksmith industry was an offender on such a scale that at one point, Rollison says, Google banned the keyword “locksmith”. In early 2009, there were so many fake listings (linked, in turn, to just a few telephone numbers) that midtown-Manhattan appeared to be home to nearly a thousand locksmiths – 20 shops on one block of 34th Street alone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greenwich locksmiths. Photograph: Scott Lynch/FlickrVision

Consultants spend their days probing search algorithms to maximise their customers’ exposure. But the blend of factors in a local search, on the side of both supply (quality of reviews, accuracy of a listing) and demand (geographic proximity, search history), make it a formidable field of study.

And what of those businesses, such as the Exotic Hair Salon on 76th Street off Roosevelt Avenue, that are completely digitally invisible? The owners and stylists, a pair of immigrants from Colombia and Honduras, did not seem perturbed by this state of affairs, and why should they be? The shop is busy, their customers are regulars, and they come in every week.

You could perceive this part of Queens, then, as the muddled frontier of technology’s domain. And perhaps the slow adoption of internet business strategies here isn’t a sign of the weakness of virtual connections, but the strength of real-world ties: routine, word-of-mouth referrals, friendship, proximity, street presence, and so on.

Besides, it’s not as if owners and customers here live in the recent past, finding their way on pocket street guides. Carlos Castaña, the manager of Los Chuzos, hasn’t gotten around to setting up a website for the restaurant – but he has no illusions about the influence of the virtual world. “Everything happens on here,” he said, holding up his iPhone. Except, perhaps, finding a place to have lunch.