Interview with Lior Ron, Hotpot Product Manager

Last week in This Week in Startups, Jason Calcanis had a great interview with Lior Ron (who like hotpot has his name backwards šŸ™‚ ),the product manager for Google Hotpot. The interview is interesting, gives insight to the technology and Google’s thinking about its role going forward and its relationship to personalized search. The interview …

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New Google Dashboard Analytics Gone Missing

Update : A spokesperson from Google just sent me the following; Just saw your post from today and wanted to let you know that we do have some improvements to the Places dashboard coming, but they may not make it onto Santa’s sleigh for delivery by the holidays. šŸ˜‰ Google recently pushed out anĀ upgraded Places …

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The Rubicon has Been Crossed -Local Pages as Transaction Interface

Yesterday was a seminal moment in Local. It largely went unnoticed but it reflects the rapid monetization of location pages by the major search engines. Bing*Ā announced a number of local, map and mobile upgrades that improve an already good, but under rated and under used product. Clearly, they are battling toe to toe feature wise …

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TripAdvisor Continuing to Limit Reviews in Google Places

Over the weekend, we reported that TripAdvisor reviews, while not showing up in UK, were returning to US listings. Apparently, it is just a fluke as TNoozĀ reports that TripAdvisor is continuing their restrictions on Google using Reviews in Places. From TNooz and TA: ā€œDespite the rumours, we are continuing to restrict TripAdvisor content on Google …

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Google Category Tool Updated

We have updated the Google Places Category Tool with a “dump” of currentĀ categories and synonyms. From the last time we updated the data a year ago, Google deleted 170 categories and 1922 synonyms, leaving exactly 1900 primary categories in the list. Most of the deleted categories were plural duplicates of existing categories. I.E. “Surgeons” was …

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