Yahoo turns numb on Google prank

Yahoo at a loss over phoney map listing

Yahoo is investigating a fake posting on its Yahoo Local service that listed a pet store at the address that actually houses Google's corporate headquarters, a company spokeswoman told vnunet.com. 

The spokeswoman declined to comment further, but sources close to the company refused to rule out the possibility of its being a joke by Yahoo engineers.

Yahoo unveiled a beta of its new Yahoo Maps application on 3 October. The Silicon Valley Sleuth blog reported that the service had a listing for 'The Dude's Fish Store' at Google's street address in Mountain View, California. 

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The listing also pointed to a website hosted on Yahoo's local listings service. The phone number listed on the website and the Yahoo Local listing is for a Google employee called 'Rudi'.

The number is listed in Google's corporate directory but, despite several attempts on Monday, the phone was not answered.

The voice mail message had been changed to: 'Hi there. If you've called for The Dude's Fish Store, please leave a message. If you're trying to reach Rudi, please call my cell phone."

The listing in the Yahoo database was removed by Friday, but the store's business listing, including Google's phone number, is still available.

There are several pointers in the listings which suggest that it is intended as a joke. The site contains a link to Stanford University as well as one claiming to be the 'Bestest page' that links to Google. It also claims that the store's employees speak Russian and German. 

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford when they founded Google. Brin is a native of Moscow, and the reference to the German language could be a pointer to the last name of Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

While anybody could have entered the information and created the website, Yahoo engineers are likely suspects because they had ample access to the databases to add the information prior to the new product's launch.

Google only confirmed that its headquarters are located on the mailing address that was listed in the original entry for The Dude's Fish Store in the database for Yahoo Local, but declined any further comment.

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