Mike Blumenthal

Updated These url’s have been removed and replaced with maps.google.com as the url. I would infer from this that it was in fact spam. Greg Sterling of Screenwerks has reported a possible affiliate mapspam incident on Google for the search New York Hotels. These listings look very similar to those noted by Matt McGee in …

Updated 9:00 04/03/08 Gregor J. Rothfuss of Google.com notes that the Hybrid view is now moved under Satellite view. Click on it to see “Show labels” (the old Hybrid view). Frank Taylor, Google Earth Blog reported that New Contour Lines in Google Maps. Google has announced a new feature to the terrain relief maps they …

I have put the following to a number of folks whose opinion I respect. Premise: The internet is coming face to face with the communities we live in. Local is at the nexus of this juncture. With the iPhone we now listen to our music, answer our phones, read our email, look at our maps …

Comparing market share and market share trends between Google Maps and the various Yahoo local properties is complicated by the fact (pointed out by Steve Espinosa) that Yahoo spreads their local traffic across three sites: Yahoo Local, Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Yellow Pages, To clarify I once again went back to the well and asked …

In late February I reported on a Maps Record failure with a medical listing where the record had been conflated with another physician and it turns out with a hospital as well (image of physician mixup / image of hospital-dr. mix up). I reported the problem to the Google Groups for Business forum. The problem …

In a quiet upgrade to the Local Business Center, Google has provided business owners with the option of using their entered address as the source for information for the Plus Box found in the main search results. The problem with errors and frustation with the complexities in fixing them had been noted here and at …

Last week in, Mapping Marketshare: Maps Up, Mapquest Down & Yahoo Local is UP! a reader noted that it was unfair comparing Yahoo Maps with Google Maps since Yahoo split out Maps and Local into two products. Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has redrawn the graph to show Yahoo Maps & Local. She has also represented …

Ahmed of iBegin has just written an insightful piece about fighting local spam in response to the recent articles that have appeared , SearchEngineland, eClick, Small Business SEM and here about affiliate spam at Yahoo. He sites some interesting statistics that only 1/2 of 1% of all user edits are malicious. However the impact of these …

Update: Please see An Internet Change of Address Guide It used to be a relatively simple job to get your address changed when you moved a business. You simply needed to contact the four or five principal parties; the Post Office, the Phone Company, your Yellow Page Rep (actually he would track you down), the Newspaper …