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| By Bill Slawski, on October 7, 2011 I love local search. It follows many practices similar to Web search, though different often in ways that do reflect an attempt to map the real world. Google’s Streetview cars are a little like Google’s webcrawler Googlebot. Instead of collecting URLs for Websites, Google Maps collects addresses to associate with businesses, nonprofits, government offices, parks, landmarks, and many other destinations. It has its own challenges as well, such as the streetviews car being turned away at sentry guard booths for military bases, or not being able to drive down “private” roads. Google Maps also can’t use latitude and longitude coordinates in places like China since their export and use is classified by that country as if they were munitions. 
I’m also often frustrated by local search. Driving directions from Google often begin by telling you to go “east” or “west” on your first turn. I’m not Mason or Dixon, Lewis or Clark, and I don’t carry an in-car compass with me when I drive. I often have no problems with the directions other than that, for the first 99% of the trip, and then have problems with the last few hundred feet. Continue reading GPS to Correct Google Maps and Driving Directions as a Local Search Ranking Factor? By Bill Slawski, on September 8, 2011 A new patent application from Apple describes how they might incorporate user information data into ranking locations in their map application searches. This probably has some implications for businesses that rely upon services like Google Maps and Google Place pages to bring visitors to their shops and offices, and I thought it was worth exploring the Apple patent in more detail. It appears that in some instances, certain types of applications might be better suited for sharing information than search, and a rich smartphone environment might be one of those when it comes to local maps. A couple of years back, Google researchers published a study titled Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! A logs-based comparison of search users on different devices (pdf) where they explored how people used different devices to connect to the Web, and looked at the kinds of queries that they performed. One conclusion in the paper was that search behavior on desktop computers and on iPhones were more similar than on other types of mobile phones. In an area where the researchers expected some differences between what people searched for on an iPhone compared to a desktop computer was local search type queries, with the expectation that there would be a good deal more location based searches on the mobile devices. But, in what they called one of the most surprising conclusions of the study, they found that there were only “1.7% more local queries issued from an iPhone than from a computer.” Continue reading Crowdsourcing Behind New Apple Local Search Patent By Bill Slawski, on September 1, 2011 When you look at web page search results for a Web search, there are usually three important elements displayed for each page. One is the page title, which also acts as a link to the page. Another is the URL of the page, which sometimes gives you a hint of what you might find at the page if the URL shows a meaningful directory category or two for the page. The third element is a snippet of text for the page, which provides a description of some type for what you might find on the page. This is sometimes taken from the meta description for the page if it contains the keywords you searched for or possibly a synonym for one or more keywords, or often some text from the page itself if that snippet of text contains the keywords or synonyms for those. Snippets aren’t limited solely to Web search results, and recently a new type of snippet has been showing on Google Place Pages, as highlighted in the image below: 
A Google patent granted this week provides a detailed look at short snippets like these related to businesses and products, and gives us some insights into what the people at Google may be thinking about when they come up with the snippets. This type of snippet was the topic of a blog post from Mike Blumenthal titled Google Places Descriptor Snippets. I’m not sure that I like the name “Descriptor” from Mike’s name to describe them – it reminds me of Transformers for some reason (or would that be “descripticon” snippets). Continue reading Google’s New Sentiment Phrase Snippets for Google Places By Bill Slawski, on November 29, 2010 Chances are that you’ve seen or even used location-based services from the Web, such as Facebook Places, Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Scvng, and including locations in your tweets. Google offers a number of location-based services, such as: Continue reading Google to Provide Better Accuracy in Location-Based Services? By Bill Slawski, on November 2, 2010 Do reviews of businesses and products at Google influence how well those might show up in Place searches or product searches? It’s possible that they may, and a bigger question might be how much weight might Google give to each review that it sees. An answer, in part, to that may depend upon a reputation score associated with the people leaving reviews. People do go online in search of reviews and ratings for businesses and products, and the search engines are trying to provide that information when and where they think it might be useful. Starred ratings are also showing in Google’s Web search with Rich Snippets, and the presence of ratings may influence whether or not someone clicks through a snippet from Google’s search results. A recent change to how Google shows search results in Web search may mean that if Google thinks you are performing a search where local search results are appropriate, then Google may show those local results as if they were organic search listings. Google refers to this change as Place Search, and it can have an impact upon the amount of visitors a site may receive, and possibly increase the number of contacts for a business listed in those results. A patent from Google granted today, Systems and methods for reputation management (US Patent 7,827,052), takes a closer look at the people who provide reviews and ratings for businesses and products, and describes a way of creating a reputation score for those reviewers modeled after Google’s PageRank algorithm. Continue reading How Google may Manage Reputations for Reviewers and Raters By Bill Slawski, on October 3, 2010 Will Google start inserting links to Google Maps on web pages when it finds location information on those pages? A recently published patent application from Google describes how it might identify location information on web pages, verify the locations found on those pages, and insert links to maps after finding and verifying them. The patent filing explains that while many websites include an address or addresses for their locations and for the locations of other businesses and organizations, those sites don’t often include maps or directions to help make it easier for people visit in person. There are a few reasons why sites might not include those types of features on their pages: - Including a map or a link to a map might involve the payment of licensing fees from some map providers.
- It can take some work to integrate a map onto the pages of a website.
- Many of the maps available to web site owners don’t provide features that are particularly helpful to potential visitors.
I know that I’ve cut and pasted many addresses from web pages in the past into Google Maps to get directions to places I’ve wanted to visit or find out more about. If Google made it so that I could press a button on my browser, and any address information on a page would automatically link to a Google Map for that address, I would probably use that feature. That browser button approach is one alternative to address-linking described in the patent filing. Continue reading How Google Might Automatically Insert Links to Google Maps in Web Pages By Bill Slawski, on October 1, 2010 I intended writing about a trio of patent filings involving Google Maps, but ended up taking a detour. I might get to the patent applications before the end of this post, but I might run out of gas and not quite make it. The freshly published patent applications describe features Google may add to make Google Maps more interesting. But if you haven’t been paying much attention, you may have missed a number of interesting features available already at Google Maps. I started out my exploration of Google Maps by looking at the journey between where I live and Washington, DC. 
Continue reading Touring Google Maps By Bill Slawski, on September 16, 2010 [Added 10:53 pm (edt) - Make sure to check the comments for somewhat of an amendment on the observation that starts this post... Now you may have to save a location with Google (via the "remember this location" or "change location") like you also see when checking movie times or weather, to see local map results in a query which doesn't include a geographic location... I don't believe that was true before Google Instant was turned on.] Not long ago, when you typed “pizza” into Google, you would see a map and a number of local pizza places listed in your search results. Have you noticed that no local maps show up anymore when you type “pizza” or “plumber” or “toy store” into Google these days? Those maps may be a victim of the caching needed to save bandwidth for Google Instant… Last week, Google made a change to their search interface that has drawn a lot of attention and discussion across the Web. Google refers to the change as Google Instant, and the impact of the change is that when you type into Google’s search box, in addition to seeing a dropdown box offering query suggestions, the search results that you see update as you type. Those instant results were described in a patent filing from Google more than five years ago – see my 2005 post: Can Google Read Your Mind? Processing Predictive Queries. Continue reading Google Instant: Tradeoffs Include Less Implied Local Results? Page 1 of 1112345»10...Last » | Change LanguageSEOby the Sea  To find out about professional search engine optimization (SEO), consulting and internet marketing services, for your site or business contact Bill Slawski at: SEO by the Sea, Inc.84 Washington St Warrenton, VA 20186 9am - 5pm (EST) Social Networks for Bill Slawski:    |
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