While Firefox is not supposed to have geolocation available until ver 3.1, it appears that Google is personalizing search results using some form of geolocation now.
Last month, David Mihm first spotted and pointed out a new Universal Local Search Result; the Branded Local One Box. The new Universal Result appears to only show in Firefox, for regional brand related searches. It requires that the searcher is in the same general area as the business.
I live in Olean and on the search for the company named Barbara Oliver & Co. Jewelry (no local modifier) which is 70 miles away in Buffalo I am presented the new Branded Local Onebox. I get the following result in Firefox with the Google Toolbar (not Safari and not IE):
David who lives in Portland searched on the business name Pacific Benefits Group and saw:
(more…)
With the swicthover to the new forum, Mapspam reporting was temporarily buried amongst the many threads. Last week its profile has once again risen and the thread is now visible at the highest level of the forum
Kudos to Maps Guide Adam and Google for again giving people easy access to this reporting tool.
Never one to be happy with half of a barrel…Now if they could just figure out how to get folks to provide enough structured information in their posts so that the many volunteers could help them more easily.
Google has released some results from their eye tracking studies at the Official Google Blog. The results confirm the value of having your listing show up in the Universal Local Results.
From the entry:
Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.
When designing the user interface for Universal Search, the team wanted to incorporate thumbnail images to better represent certain kinds of results. For example, in the [how to tie a tie] example above, we have added thumbnails for Image and Video results. However, we were concerned that the thumbnail images might be distracting and disrupt the well-established order of result evaluation.
We ran a series of eye-tracking studies where we compared how users scan the search results pages with and without thumbnail images. Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.
Google is confirming that the Universal results do not disrupt the typical scanning pattern of users and that even with thumbnails (and obviously other Universal results), users were able to find what they wanted at the top of the page.
