Google enhances discoverability of businesses in Streetview

At the Google Lat-Long, Google has announced a new release of local businesses annotations “to help improve the discoverability of content in Street View….For now, browsing a location in Street View will show the top listings for that immediate area. We will be extending this coverage soon to include more businesses and also transit locations” …

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Google Places Quality Guideline Update

Google has recently added a new section to the Google Places quality guidelines concerning Custom Attributes & Description fields. From the updated guidelines (bold is mine): Custom Attributes & Description Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, …

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Google Maps and the QR Code – Why Use Google’s?

Google Places recently added the ability for a business to create a printable QR code for their business that takes a user to their Places Page. In today’s Lat-Long blog post Google is suggesting the following possible uses for the code: Add it to the back of business cards: Lots of you are already giving …

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Google Maps Adds Contact Form for Verification Issues

Yesterday, I criticized Google for removing the Verification Issues Topic from the forums. Verification issues  are a very obvious point of friction between the SMB and Local Business Center Google Places management area. Verification after the phone call or post card is requested, goes wrong often enough that a number of SMBs are left without …

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Google Places – Will Customer Service Decline Further?

As part of Google’s rebranding of the Local Business Center to Google Places, they have created a new help area and a totally new forum area for uses of the Google Places center. The forum move is particularly dramatic and likely to be very disruptive.   Google has archived the very active threads relating to …

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Google Rebrands LBC as Google Places and Adds Features

Correction 8:50 am: Google “inadvertently included the wrong screenshot on the press site – the image of the dashboard featuring the option to add a map and download KML. We’re always testing features internally and may or may not release them; we didn’t intend to indicate that we were launching these features”. Google announced earlier …

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Google Maps #2 Map Provider in US- #1 Mapping Site in US? Google Maps API

This talk, The New Meaning of Mapping, was given last week by Michael Jones, Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, at theWhere2.0 conference. Previously he was Chief Technologist of Google Maps, Earth, and Local Search and was originally responsible for development of the technology used in the creation of Google Earth. The presentation includes a number of …

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