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 Google.
Google has a full-blown disaster relief center with a wide range of updates, free Google [...]

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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 lengthy post on the subject. As Mike points out this could potentially complicate the emerging area [...]

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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 didn’t become more “transparent” and responsive to government concerns. Almost on cue a number of companies have filed diverse complaints with Germany’s [...]

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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 small real estate companies a month.”
(Update: We now understand that the Realtor.org blog post linked above may have misquoted [...]

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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’s the Google LatLong blog discussion of how they envision its use:
Holding a special event today? Want [...]

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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 company is going to be both careful and thoughtful about how it [...]

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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 apps.
It’s called “Near Me Now,” and Google previewed it last month — [...]

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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 analytics. The analytics are a summary of what they would see in their Google [...]

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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 your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, [...]

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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 influential factor. I’ll describe what appears to’ve happened, and how it can impact local business rankings.

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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 map that’s tied to your IP address.
But type in “seo,” “seo company,” “web design company” and several terms related to these two types [...]

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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 widespread adoption of the
iPhone, the release of [...]

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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 became a cornerstone of Google’s strategy with a string of announcements, product tweaks and [...]

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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 confirm that Yelp was going to sell. And I spoke to someone (not at Yelp) who [...]

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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 the wrong URL when a Favorite Places decal is scanned, says it has submitted [...]

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