Has Google lost your address? Now you can help it find you.

Starting this week, the Mountain View search giant is letting users edit the errors found in its online mapping product.

“Sometimes, a location can be a little off on a map and your friends can’t find you,” the Mountain View company explained in a video posted on YouTube by software engineer Seth LaForge. “Now you can fix that.”

The move comes as Google grapples with opening more of its operations to outsiders. Once notoriously closed and secretive, the company is increasingly seeking to turn itself into a platform for other businesses.

To be successful, the ambitious effort will require contributions from people around the world, ranging from software developers who write new applications to owners of mom and pop businesses who enter information on the site about their grocery store, coffee shop or dry cleaners.

“There are multiple reasons that Google is doing this and one of them is to clean up and improve the quality of the data,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst with Sterling Market Research.

“Inaccurate Google map locations are a problem occasionally for most people who use online maps,” said Gus Allen, founder of Swamplot, a Houston real estate blog. Among other services, Allen directs his readers to local demolitions using Google maps. Last week, Google mistakenly placed a Houston address in Oklahoma, he said.

To edit Google Maps, a person needs a Google account. If someone see an error while searching for a business, he or she can click an “edit” link. For example, Google originally marked the entrance to the San Jose Mercury News on a side road leading to the employee parking lot until a reporter dragged the marker to the correct location – the newspaper’s grand 1950s style entrance – on Tuesday afternoon.

Google said it will prevent abuse by restricting changes to certain listings, like hospitals, police stations and schools, as well as the addresses of businesses that have claimed their listing online at Google’s Local Business Center. Edited addresses will be clearly marked, and links to original address markings will be retained.

Users can also report abuse through a link. Certain edits, such as moving a marker more than 200 yards, must be reviewed by a Google employee.

“Move a marker, and make your virtual neighborhood a better place – that is, in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, where it works right now,” LaForge wrote in a blog post on Monday.

By making maps more useful, Google is trying to capture a larger share of the dollars spent on online Yellow Page advertising and local search – which is estimated to grow from $1.9 billion this early to $4.9 billion in 2011, according to the Kelsey Group of Princeton, NJ.

Yahoo is also eyeing this market. It began allowing businesses to update their information in January 2007. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the number of companies that has done so is in the high hundreds of thousands.

A spokeswoman for Google said more than a million businesses have “interacted” with their online business center.

While there are an estimated 25 million local businesses in the United States, the total number of advertisers in the traditional Yellow Pages is 3.5 million, according to the Kelsey Group.

Sterling said the relatively large numbers reported by Yahoo and Google illustrate the great potential for local search online, which is still at a very early stage. “There’s been a lot of learning and now all the parties are figuring it out,” he said.