Mike Blumenthal

This morning I wrote a piece: Google Maps: The changing landscape for reviews that speculated on the removal of CitySearch, InsiderPages and Yelp reviews from Google Maps. They were gone. I verified that on a specific and general basis as recently as January 6th. A reader has pointed out that they are now back. CitySearch, …

Over the past year with the development of user generated content and the rise of reviews in particular small businesses have been struggling with exactly how to approach this new form of customer input. The more internet aware have embraced the review process and have been using the process for reputation management, quality improvement through …

The Local OneBox 10 Pack is new and has yet to be fully vetted. Its appearance off and on over the past week has made testing a bit of a struggle. One of my observations has been, that while Google may be going further afield to provide accurate results, in very rural searches they are …

Greg Sterling has received “official confirmation” from Google that the Local OneBox will now often contain 10 listings (although could include 3 or 1 when appropriate). From Search Engine Land: Google said today that the reason it’s showing more links is because usability testing revealed that many people didn’t realize there was additional local content …

It was just about one year ago that Google last upgraded the Local OneBox. At the time it led to a significant increase in Maps usage. It seems that an upgrade to the OneBox is or soon will be upon us. It was available all of last night and this morning and reports have come …

Update 1/22/08 9:40 PM EST It is once again appearingThe newly formatted Local OneBox expansion (first spotted by Paul Jahn last week and seen again on Sunday) from 3 entries to 10 now appears to be live. It started showing up last night and local searches are still returning the new OneBox as of this …

Update 1/21/08 9:00 pmThe Local Onebox 10 pack is now appearing across a broad range of searches once again. On searches that previously returned the authoritative Local OneBox it is now returning the 10-Pack or no local results at all. Last week there were sitings of a new improved and expanded Local OneBox. They have …

The other day when I wrote about the RSS feed results showing up in Google Maps and some of those results showing up in the Maps results I learned a lot: •Lior from Google Latt-Longblog pointed out that the results from user generated Maps have been showing up in the main Maps results since October. …

I am sure that most you saw the screen shot of Local OneBox test that Paul Jahn posted at searchengineguide.com (and was discussed by Greg Sterling) which shows the OneBox with 10 listings instead of the current 3: There are several points of interest in the test. •The space allocated at the top of the …