Mike Blumenthal

We have long noted that you rent but don’t own your business profile at Google. As Tim Capper has previously pointed out that is no more true than with the careless scraping of event sites that Google pulls off to add events to local search results.  You do though, just have to wonder when the …

Google always tests a lot and for some reason I have been seeing a number of these tests on one of my accounts on my iPhone. Changes in the layout of the mobile branded result were spotted by Joy in June. Here is another albeit an obvious test as I am only seeing on one …

My nephew and his fiancee recently moved back to Buffalo NY from San Francisco. Their dream was to help create and foster the art scene in the reviving Buffalo urban culture. So they created the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (aka BICA)1.  They bought some gallery space and put up a somewhat inadequate  SquareSpace website2. …

Yesterday, I was doing some spam research and noticed that in Safari, when clicking the More Places link at the bottom of the desktop 3-Pack it was taking me into Maps.  Thinking it a temporary glitch I switched to Chrome and the behavior was normal and it took me into the Local Finder.  Today, both …

Google Local has always been aggravating when it comes to showing your photos. Google would swap out your photos seemingly randomly. Your carefully chosen profile photo would suddenly disappear and be replaced with a skanky alternative of Google’s choosing. There never seemed to be rhyme or reason.  But I have noticed that changing. Not the …

On mobile, local brand searches on Google have long been mundane affairs largely focused on the brand that the consumer searched for. They delivered up nearby locations, a logo, an about tab and typically highlighted pages from the brand site. It was a straight up recovery search by a customer that your brand owned.  Even …

Changes are coming fast and furious to the new(wish) Local Scroll Pack.  This is the first one that I have seen that has included an ad. And it is verrrrrrry visible in this format.  The visual stimuli are so pervasive that one hardly notices the ad destination. Go figure.  And here is an ad from …

Last week, we saw Google updating the as yet not fully rolled out Scroll Pack with stronger and more obvious calls to action for user engagement. This week I am seeing yet another, subtler, update; Google has added more and more colorful icons for each section of the Scroll Pack result. This is the second …

The new(ish) Local Scroll Pack, which remains with very limited visibility, has been updated with a bolder call to action to view more locations. In addition it now includes additional personalization gleaned from Maps and greater detail if a user is looking for more categories related to the search.  In the initial preview, it was …

Here are some other articles, podcasts and writings from me around the interwebs: TextBack Case Study: Driving Big Reviews For A Small Restaurant – is a case study of a small local lunch restaurant, The Spot 2 Be, that I discovered on my bike ride to work that just opened a year ago  serving breakfast …