Wednesday, June 3. 2009

Google Local Business Center Updated

Google Local Business Center is a free tool for small businesses. It now sports a dashboard and integration with Google Maps so that small biz owners can see what terms drive traffic to their sights and from where. Among the goodies:

- "Zip code information shows where customers are coming from when they request directions to a business listing."
- information on when results come from a Google search vs. a Google Maps search

This looks like a great tool to help educate prospective location intelligence users!

- Google Blog post
via Internet News

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Location Intelligence at 06:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, June 1. 2009

Bing Maps not yet in Bing

Bing (Preview) is live in the U.S. so I gave it my standard search test "kite boston." It rewrote it as Kites in Boston, MA and returned a kite shop some 20 miles away as the top result. I don't like that Bing rewrote the query in the input box; it'd be ok if it responded with "I thought you meant this and queried on it instead," but left my text as it was.

Amusingly:

- The provided map of results moves obediently with you as you scroll down the page. I found that distracting, but perhaps I'll get used to it.

- The map still says Microsoft Virtual Earth on it. (I just noticed that in the Google returns, the map is not logoed at all; it just includes copyright. Perhaps that's a space consideration?)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Microsoft at 06:12 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

What Ever Happened to ...Lars Rasmussen?

Converge reports that Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens Rasmussen, who previously developed location technology that became Google Maps are behind Wave, the newly announced communications aggregations from Google.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |