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The issue of company or organization record duplication is a problem of many career web-sites. It seems that Stack Overflow Jobs (SOJ) doesn't address this problem systematically.

Possible approaches:

  1. On a page of every organization there is a «Flag spam» link, why not to add a button «Report a duplicate»? That way users could report about potential company duplicates and assist the SOJ team to merge the duplicate pages.

  2. To implement ability not only report about duplicates but also to edit a company data, just like in Google Maps, where a user can add, edit, or remove item. In our case, it should be the ability to edit company meta-data, e.g. logo, legal status, website, HQ, number of employees, annual revenue, etc.

Important:
Please, try to keep the most updated logo version at the best quality when merging the companies. There is nothing worse than looking at outdated pixelated logo of the company at its profile.

Related questions:

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  • I think it would be up to the company in question to determine what is a duplicate and what should stay/go.
    – Joe W
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 20:50
  • @JoeW, it's an ideal situation when the company's page is maintained by the company itself, but let be honest, it's an utopia. The wiki-approach, when users can maintain the page with a supervision by SOJ is more realistic.
    – Mike
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 20:54
  • 3
    But those companies pay for the service so trying to treat it as a wiki-like environment where the users have control is not an ideal thing.
    – Joe W
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 20:58
  • Do the companies pay for a page on SOJ? I got an impression that it's not a case, otherwise there would not be 10+ pages for Intel or Google.
    – Mike
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 21:17
  • meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/351964/…
    – Joe W
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 21:37
  • @JoeW, the link you've provided is about a price for posting an open position, while I'm talking about the company profile page, which is displayed when clicking on «at …» in the developer story, e.g., stackoverflow.com/users/story/lists/123456/compName.
    – Mike
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 21:46
  • So you want to police what users themselves put into their user stories? How are you going to determine which one is the correct version? Companies do change their name/branding and not everyone updates it in all the places they should and it shouldn't fall onto SE or the users themselves to make sure that other users are using the correct information for where they work And I think your request should be about the user story and not jobs itself
    – Joe W
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 21:50
  • @JoeW, my request is about companies page, which is binded to user story (when I start typing a company name, I get suggestions based on existing companies profiles). How to do? It depends on a implementation budget (time/efforts), it might be a basic query, returning similar names (like/regex), it might be more sophisticated solution based on one of the linguistic distance metrics, e.g. Levenshtein distance. I believe, that for the beginning, an automatic merge of the companies with 100% same stemmed (no case sensitive, w/o Ltd., Corp., Inc., etc.) name will be enough.
    – Mike
    Commented Nov 4, 2019 at 23:15
  • Pretty sure it is possible for two different companies to have the same name but one be LLC or INC along similar lines. So your idea could merge together to unrelated companies
    – Joe W
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 3:48
  • @JoeW, then based on domain + human verification for the cases where the local domains are entered. But most of the thing people will do individually. The bottom line, there should not be 10 instances for Intel or Google. How to do it — it's a separate question for the SOJ team.
    – Mike
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 8:30

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