How we list
Almost every listing starts from Google's public listings for businesses in the Shire — the name, address, hours, phone number, website and its star rating on Google. We don't choose them one by one. Within each of our five categories, businesses are ranked by Google rating, weighted by how many ratings it rests on, and the best of each go in. Ranking within a category keeps the plumbers from being up against the cafés, so every kind of business gets a place. Others come in because Google Maps puts them in its top three when you search for their trade in their suburb; they still need a rating of 4.3 or more and a solid number of ratings. We've added a small number ourselves.
Then we check. Anything that's closed or outside the Shire comes off, and so does any national chain or franchise, so every business here is independently owned. We write the description ourselves. Nobody asks to be listed and nobody pays to be.
We get the edges wrong sometimes — when we do, drop us a line and we'll re-check. Every listing has a link on it for putting things right, and one for taking the page down. If you'd rather not be listed, use it: the page usually comes off within a minute (if a lot of requests arrive at once, a person takes it down the same day), you don't owe us a reason, and we note not to list you again.
Photos and copy
Where we don't have a photograph of a place, its listing shows the business's name and trade instead of a picture. Where a business has sent us photos, we use those. Some listings carry the main image from the business's own website, credited to the business on its listing, until it sends one it would rather use — where that's the case, the source is recorded against the listing, and we swap or remove it the day we're asked. We don't take images from Google Business Profile, because those belong to whoever uploaded them, and that's often a customer rather than the business. If you own a business and want an image swapped or removed, let us know and we'll sort it.
Ratings and maps
Where a listing shows a star rating, it's the average of the ratings people have left for the business on Google, with how many there are — we say so on the listing, and it links to the business's Google listing, where the reviews are. It's a figure we copied, not a score we gave: we don't write ratings or reviews of our own.
We don't copy the reviews themselves. A review belongs to the person who wrote it, the same as a photo does, and it's not ours to republish. The only customer quotes on Shiremade are ones a business has sent us itself, word for word. We ask them to check with the customer first, and the listing says the business chose them. If one of them is yours and you'd rather it came down, tell us and it will.
We do use the rating to put places in order. The home page, the pages for each trade and each suburb, and Browse unless you switch it to A to Z, list places by Google rating, weighted by how many ratings it rests on — so a 4.8 from three hundred ratings sits above a 5.0 from three. The hand-picked lists run in the order we chose. Nobody can pay to move up, or to be here at all.
The map on a listing is drawn from OpenStreetMap data and served from here, so reading a listing doesn't hand your visit to a mapping company. A business that comes to you — a mobile trade, say — shows its suburb only: no street address, no pin and no directions. The link to its reviews opens its own Google listing, which shows whatever the business has chosen to show there. So does any listing we don't have a street address for. Every other listing shows the street address from its Google listing, pinned on the map. If that's your home and you'd rather it came off, let us know and we'll take it down to the suburb.
Data we collect
Only what you send us. There are no analytics on this site, no cookies of our own, no accounts and no tracking scripts — it's a set of static pages. Our host keeps standard server logs (the page requested, roughly when, the kind of browser), which we don't read for anything but diagnosing a fault.
Filtering on Browse runs in your browser, on your device. One caveat worth being straight about: what you type ends up in the page address, so it reaches our host in the request like any other URL. We don't store it or look at it.
There are two ways to send us something: the contact form, and the forms for business owners linked from every listing, which are also where a page gets taken down. Whatever you send through any of them is saved as our record and emailed to us through Brevo, the company we use to send it, so Brevo handles a copy on its way to our inbox. Brevo is based in France. That's as far as it goes: nobody is added to a contact list or a mailing list.
If you use the contact form, we keep your name, your email, what it's about and what you wrote, with the time you sent it and which page of ours you sent it from, as our record that you got in touch. The site's copy deletes itself after six months. The email in our inbox stays until we delete it, which we will if you ask.
If you fill in the form for business owners, we keep exactly what you typed — your name, your role, how to reach you, and whatever you told us about the listing — because that's the whole point of it, and because it's our record that you got in touch and what you asked for. The form adds a few things of its own: which listing it's about, the wording you agreed to and when that page was built, the time you sent it, and which page of ours you sent it from. Those let us match your note to the right business and let both of us see later what was actually said.
None of these forms records your IP address, your location or your browser. To stop anyone flooding them, we count submissions from each network for an hour — never your full address, and the count is gone when the hour is up. Apart from Brevo carrying it to us, none of it is shared with anyone.
The forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to check that a person, not a script, is filling them in. To do that Cloudflare looks at your connection and browser, your IP address included, but not at anything you type. Cloudflare says it uses that only to detect and block bots and to improve the check, not to identify, profile or target anyone.
Ask us to delete what you've sent and we will, from the site's records and from our inbox. We'd keep one line noting that a record was deleted and when — without that we'd have no way of knowing we'd ever spoken, which is worse for you than for us if you've asked to be left alone.
Corrections
If anything on a listing is wrong — closed, moved, miscategorised, an outdated photo — tell us. We aim to fix corrections within a week.
A few last things
We're a small operation. We don't have a privacy officer, a legal team, or a feedback queue. We have an inbox, and we read every message. This page may change. If it does, the change will be in service of being clearer and shorter — not the other way around.