Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“Once the retailer has done the critical work of getting a customer into their store, the retailer needs to know that their ads and products will be shown,” said Todd Sherman, PointInside’s chief marketing officer. “A customer inside a store is a high-value target for advertisers and a lucrative revenue opportunity for Google. It is likely that Google’s indoor maps will operate with Google’s very successful AdWords model, where algorithms decide which ads to present and are biased toward the highest bidder—which can easily be a competitor.”

Note: PointInside sells its own search-inside retail product. We examined extensive screen captures and videos of its results and spoke with others involved, and we’re comfortable—for now—with the validity of its experiments.

One CIO of a large national retail chain that is aggressively involved in Mobile Commerce, who asked that both his name and his chain not be identified, said that he sees this as more of an oversight on Google’s part than anything evil. “Google usually isn’t that evil. That’s a bridge too far, even for them. This speaks to glitch more than intent. It’s not being indexed.”

The CIO argued, though, that these incidents are good in that they force retailers—at a very early stage—to think through the implications of things like mobile in-store mapping. “You’re trying to map a bunch of really complex stuff together all at once. Are the rules of engagement even specified? You’re providing a map of the store. What’s the responsibility of the search provider? The first thing I’d want to do is understand what the contract says.”

The fundamental problem here, by the way, is not actually with Google Maps, Google Local or how Home Depot coded the maps it delivered to Google. It’s with the lack of available information about local inventory. eBay is struggling with this now, and it is only the latest to deal with the nightmare that is local inventory.

Has Home Depot, for example, taken all of the products it codes for its site and made them all available to the Googles, Yahoos and Bings of the world? Until it has, searches that legitimately should should be sending customers to Home Depot (or, in this case, letting them stay there) will go to rivals whose product codes are more easily search-engine accessible.

That doesn’t explain away all of the strangeness from this Home Depot Google trial. But until it’s solved, the real problem will remain.