Google Places Business Adds 1,000 Categories Internationally

Jade Wang from Google's Places, business help, team posted in theGoogle Business Help forums that they have greatly expanded the business category support by adding over a 1,000 new categories internationally.

Previously, they had a very limited number of categories for international (Non USA) businesses. The reason was because it was complicated to translate them all. Well, now Google has translated a ton and can support 1,000 new categories.

Jade said:

Today, we are taking a first step of many to improve categories that merchants can use to represent their businesses. Specifically, we’re adding over 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard. These categories are available globally and translated to every language Google supports.

Why not sooner? Jade explained:

DMOZ Drops Over 1 Million Sites From Directory?

Did you notice that DMOZ, one of the oldest and largest human crafted web directories, has removed over 1 million sites and 10,000 editors from their directory?

A DigitalPoint Forum thread first noticed it. If you look at the live site now, you will see 4,261,763 sites, 89,252 editors and over 1,019,865 categories in the footer. But if you go to the WayBackMachine archive you will see 5,310,345 sites, 99,997 editors and over 1,019,508 categories.

Here are screen shots:

NOW:

OLD:

As you can see, DMOZ dropped about 1 million sites from their directory and 10,000 editors. There was no announcement about this, so I am not sure if this is just a glitch on the footer.