Mike Blumenthal

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 …

I have been seeing a test of a new Local Scroll Pack result when logged in on my iPhone and using Safari. There is a different style presented for retail/restaurants than for service business. Brand packs have a slight variation as well. In the brand results, there is the card style scroll pack below the …

The Local Scroll Pack, first spotted last week, has now shown up in a greater range of categories including retail, restaurants, ERs and lawyers. Last week the new pack design  was spotted in searches for the moving companies, HVAC, locksmiths and garage door companies.  In retail and restaurants the Local Scroll Pack includes large image …