Google: Maps & Local

More Haiti Disaster Relief Resources

Come Join My Team

Google, Yahoo and Bing, among many others, are offering cash donations and resources to assist with disaster relief in Haiti. Here’s our earlier coverage of  online resources. You can also find images of post Earthquake Haiti from Bing Maps and ...

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Google Now Collecting Local Reviews From Non-Traditional Sources

In order to increase the volume and coverage of reviews on its Place Pages, Google is now apparently looking beyond the range of traditional review sources to new, non-traditional sites (e.g., blogs, articles, etc.). Mike Blumethal has written a length...

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German Companies Piling On With Anti-Trust Complaints Against Google

Last week, in a German magazine interview, government minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger suggested that Google was “becoming a giant monopoly.” She casually asserted that government action might be coming at some point if Google di...

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Google Plans To Buy Its Way Into Real Estate

Google is making its intentions in the real estate vertical more clear. Speaking this week at Inman Real Estate Connect, an industry conference, Google’s Sam Sebastian reportedly said: “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two sma...

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Google Integrates “Real-Time” Messages Into Place Pages, Makes BlackBerry Mobile App More Useful

Taking a page from Facebook or Twitter, Google is putting a bit of real-time functionality on local business Place Pages. Google is promoting the idea that small businesses can use their Place Pages to promote time-sensitive (real-time) events. Here...

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Google Mulling Several Ways To Integrate Ads On Maps

A number of articles appeared that speculate about or discuss ads on Google Maps (PC and mobile) now and in the future. Google Maps is one of Google’s most successful and valuable properties — arguably even more so in mobile — and the...

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Google’s Near Me Now: A Yelp Killer?

Just a couple weeks after failing to consummate a rumored deal to buy Yelp, Google has launched a mobile search tool that could take away the mobile market share of Yelp and similar sites/apps like Urbanspoon, MapQuest, and some of the yellow pages app...

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Bad Directions: Google Maps Sends Local Listing Reports To Wrong Business Owners

Starting last night, Google began sending out the monthly (or so) Google Local Business Center updates. The updates go out via email and contain analytical information about how many times a listing was viewed, clicked on, and other miscellaneous anal...

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Google To Introduce Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call y...

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A New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia

Google's recent introduction of Place Pages within Maps came closely in sync with some key adjustments in the factors used to rank local search content. The combination of changes has resulted in Wikipedia abruptly emerging onto the scene as a highly i...

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Google Doesn’t Want Searchers To Find SEOs & Web Designers

If you go to Google.com and type “hamburgers,” “shoes,” “candy,” “grills,” “beer,” and hundreds of other terms of ambiguous local intent, Google will almost always show you local results on a ...

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Year In Review: Local Search & Maps

While analysts and practitioners have been prognosticating the imminent arrival of local search for the last several years, 2009 was finally the year that proved us right. A number of innovations and developments in mobile search, such as the ...

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Year In Review: Search Goes Mobile

The iPhone was introduced on June 29, 2007 and that was effectively the beginning of the mobile internet era. With the iPhone also came the acceleration of mobile search for Google, the default engine for the iconic Apple device. This year mobile becam...

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Report: Google-Yelp Deal Not Happening Now

Something apparently happened. First TechCruch reported Yelp was going to sell to Google for $500 million or more. There was a frenzy of speculative coverage (including by me) that followed this initial report. The NY Times appeared to independently co...

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QuickMark Says Fix Coming Soon For Google Favorite Place Decals Bug

Google is suffering through a somewhat embarrassing turn of events regarding its Favorite Place decals, but the company that’s actually responsible for the problem says a fix is on the way. QuickMark, makers of an iPhone app that has led users to...

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