Mike Blumenthal

Update 12/21: The PlusBox is now visible in FireFox and Safari on the Mac Matt Cutts recently wrote of a New Google UI feature: Plus Box. Several things interest me about this announcement: First and foremost it is another push of local data out the main Google search window. This will continue to make Google …

The news of Google rolling out Click to Call spread like wild fire last week. I expressed optimism about the service while some, like Matt McGee expressed reservations about its impact. Pundits not to worry. Its gone today. Not sure what happened to it either. When I searched today from Olean, NY it was gone. …

Google Maps attempts to gather authoritative details of a local business by crawling & parsing the semi-structured data of on-line directories (see also Bill Slawski’s patent summary). I was curious which directories they actively use to fill in the details section. To start answering that question I analyzed the directories listed Google Maps in the …

Greywolf at threadwatch.org had an interesting post on Google testing the inclusion of Google Map data with the organic results beyond what they are currently doing. Obviously Google will be pushing their local data further into the mainstream at every opportunity and I expect to see  experiments of this ilk as they determine what really …

Will return from family visits on 11/30/06 so my postings will be sporadic at best.

I and others (see Bill Slawski’s posts) have lamented the step child stature of Google Maps and Google’s apparent unwillingness to push it out to the consumer. It has always seemed to be such a valuable service that was hidden away and hard to find. Greg Sterling talked of the difficulties with the Coupon feature. …

On November 2, I noted a beta of the Google Maps Click to Call feature. The feature is now live and out of beta on Google Maps listings. To see the feature you must be in the list view. It works flawlessly, asking your phone number, dialing the listing and then ringing through. According to …

We are in the embryonic days of local search and it is confusing. Confusing to the small business person as Anita Campbell pointed out in her blog and confounding to experts as Bill Slawski pointed out in his piece on the idosyncracies of Google Map’s Local Search data. There are many who wonder if Google’s …

I wanted to replicate Bill Slawski’s test of how well Goole Local handled libraries and see if our rural libraries faired any better in having the correct URL associated with their local listing. I was also curious if other information could be teased out of the results. I searched on four rural libraries with & …