Mike Blumenthal

Google has decided to, well… put Google back into Christmas. Maps Guide Jade posted in the Google Maps support groups announcing Google Map’s “collection of Google Maps Holiday Solutions to help get you through the holidays with ease”. After having just returned from a visit with my in-laws I got a particular chuckle from the idea …

Adwords Appearing for Competitors in Embedded Maps – Martijn Beijk, martijnbeijk.com Martijn points out that embedded Google Maps on your website could very well now include Adword ads to your competitor’s website. I presume that this is part of Google effort to push more ads out of late but their appearance on embedded Maps seems …

The recent StreetView upgrade to Google Maps to more closely resemble the functionality of Streetview on the iPhone, has also improved the ability to report inappropriate Streetview scenes. In the Google Support Groups for Maps, the invasive StreetView scenes were a common complaint. The link from StreetView takes the user to an interactive form that …

With Google’s last upgrade to the API TOS on November 12th, a storm of protest and complaint was unleashed in Great Britain. The Ordnance Survey had essentially pulled all of their publicly available data from use with Google Maps due to the TOS and the Guardian and BBC jumped into the fray on each side …

I have recently had an extensive interview with Mark Law, VP of Development & Mark Law, Vice President of Product Development and Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President & General Manager, at MapQuest, Inc, It is now published at SearchEngineLand: MapQuest: “We’ve Come Out Of Hibernation”.  Mapquest, the long time leader in mapping has been on a …

Many folks in the search marketing world, myself included, have noted that, in most Hitwise reports on Map usage, Google Maps was gaining on on Mapquest and would soon surpass them in user visits. In a recent interview (soon to be published at SEL) I asked Mark Law what he would say about the Hitwise reports of Google …

I recently looked back at my Google Analytics to get a sense of mobile traffic and saw the beginnings of mobile access. This chart, created to correspond with major iPhone rollouts, shows that iPhone usage, while still only .5% of my traffic, is on a healthy upswing. While the iPhone could view my blog reasonably …

Over the weekend, I downloaded and demonstrated Google’s new Voice Search and StreetViews to my friends that have iPhones. The Streetview feature (once I found which icon to tap) is incredibly fast and functional, much more so than on my aging PowerBook 12″ laptop. The Voice Search worked very well for me with a 95% …

There have been numerous reports in the Google Maps Troubleshooting Group over the past few days of missing locations in Maps. Here’s Sparky description the problem: I’m an avid user of Google Maps, and have between 50 and 100 saved locations, that auto-complete when I type in the search box, in addition to being able to edit them …