{"id":29,"date":"2006-10-24T10:43:44","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T14:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=29"},"modified":"2006-10-24T10:43:44","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T14:43:44","slug":"google-vocal-local-phone-number-change-other-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/24\/google-vocal-local-phone-number-change-other-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Vocal Local Phone number change &#038; other thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google&#8217;s voice driven directory assistance has removed the 877-GOOG-411 number and now automatically forwards any calls to that number to: 877-520-<span class=\"st\">FIND.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It is interesting that Google has not publicly acknowledged that the experiment is theirs and that the phone number has been changed to further distance themselves. Perhaps they didn&#8217;t want to seem like they weren&#8217;t focusing around the time of their quarterly analyst meetings. Although this clearly is a focused extension of their search capability. Pushing search out to the cell networks is clearly a way to dramatically increase their reach.<\/p>\n<p>It is not difficult to see how this could be monetized and perhaps it already is being monetized.<\/p>\n<p>1-Make this a generic service that the cell companies could use (remove Goog(le) from the number)<\/p>\n<p>2-Share local ad revenue with the  cell companies.<\/p>\n<p>Currently there is not a lot of PPC advertising in the Google Maps section although the number is growing. But Google has partnered with Verizon to sell PPC, <a title=\"Verizon spinning off their SuperPages\" href=\"http:\/\/gesterling.wordpress.com\/2006\/10\/19\/superpages-to-spin\/\">Verizon is spinning off their on-line SuperPages<\/a> and it appears that <a title=\"Using Google adwords in the local listing\" href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=23\">local listings with local ads recieve a higher listing in the directory<\/a>. So not only is Google beginning the monetiztion of directory assistance they are certainly planning more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google&#8217;s voice driven directory assistance has removed the 877-GOOG-411 number and now automatically forwards any calls to that number to: 877-520-FIND. It is interesting that Google has not publicly acknowledged that the experiment is theirs and that the phone number has been changed to further distance themselves. Perhaps they didn&#8217;t want to seem like they &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-maps-google-local"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}