Mike Blumenthal

One long standing complaint about the Local 10-Pack has been that on certain searches it returns multiple results for the same company. In July of 2008, Eric Enge interviewed Carter Maslan, Director of Product Management for Google Maps. In the interview he asked Carter whether it was appropriate to have single company dominate the listings …

If “citations” are the new link than it appears that georeferences are the new citation. Geotagging of photos, a common georeferenced data type, is gradually making its way into the mainstream. There has been a clear and steady integration of the technology into consumer products and a growing consumer awareness of the feature. Android and …

I received not one but three calls during the last week of January asking to confirm my listing for the Yellow Pages. Each time, the call attendant would assure me that I was NOT approving any charges as they talked over a computer response system. On the third call, I asked why they needed to …

Update 2/10/2009: The records returned to some state of normalcy. Since 7:00 am EST (and it is now 3:00 pm) the record is visible and working properly. Would love to hear from Maps Guide Jen where this puppy went. 🙂 Update 2/9/2009 1:30 EST: Whoaah….hold on there partner. Save the kudos for later. The record …

I ran a recent Mapquest/Google Maps comparison of visitation at Compete.com. It appears that Google Maps has passed Mapquest as the most visited mapping site: Google Maps has been gaining on Mapquest for the past two years. Hitwise data in October indicated that Maps was closing in on Mapquest. While MapQuest may have “come out …

While Firefox is not supposed to have geolocation available until ver 3.1, it appears that Google is personalizing search results using some form of geolocation now. Last month, David Mihm first spotted and pointed out a new Universal Local Search Result; the Branded Local One Box. The new Universal Result appears to only show in …

With the swicthover to the new forum, Mapspam reporting was temporarily buried amongst the many threads. Last week its profile has once again risen and the thread is now visible at the highest level of the forum Kudos to Maps Guide Adam and Google for again giving people easy access to this reporting tool. Never …

Google has released some results from their eye tracking studies at the Official Google Blog. The results confirm the value of having your listing show up in the Universal Local Results.  From the entry: Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first …