I unfortunately have to report that my Google+ My Business Page Finder tool no longer shows the Google+ page for the business in its search results.
Why not?
Because the Google Places API, which used to show the Google+ page in its response, now returns a Google Maps page instead.
I haven’t seen any announcement of this, but the docs on the Place Details Request have been changed.
The example response now shows this for the URL instead of a Google+ page:
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=10281119596374313554
And the description of what’s in that field now says:
“url contains the URL of the official Google page for this place. This will be the Google-owned page that contains the best available information about the place. Applications must link to or embed this page on any screen that shows detailed results about the place to the user.”
Those maps.google.com links bring up a regular Google map with a pushpin. If you click on the pushpin, you get the business info that you’d have gotten from many other kinds of searches, and that WOULD HAVE BEEN stored in the Google+ page for the business. Is it still stored there today? Who knows, but clearly some sort of divorce is in progress…
In related news, see Mike Blumenthal’s post on weirdly formatted Google+ page URLs.