Mike Blumenthal

Is Google “crazy” to handle business listings in Maps the way they do? A recent poster to the Manic Merging of Business Listings posted the following in regards to Google merging competing businesses: Google map has merged my clients business listing with his next door neighbor’s business. Now, google map will take visitors to his …

On Monday the Local Business Center was taken down for maintanence and fixes. We know that there has been a decrease in reports of merged business listings (although there are reports of reviews still merging between businesses). It appears that there have been several changes in the phone verification system as well: -Now the PIN …

The Local Business Center came back on line at about 2:45 EDT after being taken off line for several hours earlier today. While it does not appear that there are any new features in the LBC, it does appear that some of the merging of nearby competitors has dissipated. The original examples of Hotels merging …

Update 12:50 5/18 Temporarily Unavailable   The Google Local Business Center is unavailable for the next hour  We appreciate your patience as we perform some routine system maintenance.   More specifically, we’re updating ‘the backend’ (to employ that catchy, catchall moniker coined and lent to us by engineering folks who work on all of the technical …

How much enhanced reality is too much? The new Email ‘n Walk iPhone application (via NY Times) is an iPhone app that overlays an image of what is in front of you while you are walking down the street reading your e-mail. Presumably this prevents you from walking into something or someone. Unfortunately it only shows what …

Google treats Maps as a free resource that it provides to the public. From their point of view, any problem that exists, if it can’t be handled at an engineering level really is not significant. For users, there is an understanding that Maps is fulfilling a critical information role in our society and there is …

A reader sent a query several weeks ago asking for a time line of developments for Google Maps. I sent him over to the Wikipedia article on Google Maps as a possible resource. I subsequently went there myself and realized that it had not been updated in  since the end of 2007 and that many …

Google Maps has been an exhilarting product allowing many to gain a better understanding of the world around them with constant innovation. Sergey Brin noted in his annual Google Founder’s letter that “after the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months”. That’s pretty cool …

Google doesn’t frequently advertise their services or products in traditional venues very often. Apparently there are plans to advertise Chrome on TV and they ran their billboards for Goog-411 in out of the way places in September of 2007. In late April, Google introduced profile results that included personal profiles as a OneBox in the main Google search …

It is not uncommon in Google Maps for one business location to have multiple business listings. They come from Google’s many data providers, readers who create new records before checking for existing records and from the Local Business Center itself. There has always been confusion about how to handle these duplicate records as the wrong …