Leaked Documents Show How Yelp Thinks It’s Not Getting Screwed By Google

Yelp may once again feel Google is robbing it of its fair share of search traffic, with a study that’s been leaked to TechCrunch to prove it. A close read of that study actually shows that it proves the opposite — or at least, that it’s certainly not as damning as it sounds….

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Supreme Court Rules Street View “Wiretapping” Class Action Can Proceed Against Google

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Supreme Court will not review a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing a class-action lawsuit that argues Google violated the federal “Wiretap Act” when it intercepted private email and other personal data. The appellate court decision…

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Is Your Local Business Ready For Google’s Neighborhood Algorithm?

While doing some research in Costa Mesa, CA last week, I hit a Google test bucket that specified the East Side Costa Mesa neighborhood as my location in Search Tools: Google has long understood super well-known dense neighborhoods like SoHo, NY. But there’s a good reason why neighborhoods,…

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Amazon Fire Phone: Bing For Search, Nokia For Maps

The emerging consensus from the early “hands on” or “first look” reviews is that the Amazon Fire Phone has some novel and interesting features but that it doesn’t measure up, overall, to the iPhone or “true Android” devices. I’ve argued that Amazon…

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Google Introduces Richer Flight Search Experience

Google is introducing a revamped flight and hotel travel search experience. To date both products have been mostly underwhelming. The big promises of Google’s ITA acquisition have yet to bear fruit but that may change with the new Google Flight and travel search experience. Previously the…

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Google Maps Now Has Driving Directions In North Korea

North Korea Tech reports that Google Maps now has driving directions in North Korea. As the site reports, “North Korea has strict controls on internal movement, a scarcity of private car ownership and almost no Internet users.” Despite all of that, Google Maps can give those who do have…

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The Google Local Carousel Is Still Spinning Out Of Control

Almost a year ago, Google threw everyone for a loop with the rollout of the Google Local Carousel. The SEO community scrambled to try to figure out how it worked, and theories started flying about how it would change search behavior. It was immediately evident that a location’s Carousel photo…

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How SkyBox Satellite Imagery Might Aid Google’s Offline Conversion Tracking

There’s a report this morning that Google is close to buying satellite imaging company SkyBox. The purchase price is put at roughly $1 billion. The deal has yet to be confirmed. The article conjectures that Google wants the company for two potential reasons: More imagery for consumer maps…

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Founder: OpenStreetMap Already As Good Or Better Than Google Maps

Steve Coast founded OpenStreetMap (OSM) in the UK in 2004. It’s 10 years old this year. He was inspired by the Wikipedia model and compelled by a lack of available map and location data in the UK at that time. Coast now works for GPS navigation company Telenav, which owns location-based…

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Google “Mapping” Real World With Incredible Precision For Self-Driving Cars

A fascinating article in the Atlantic appeared this weekend. It’s mostly about Google’s self-driving cars and how they operate technically. But it’s also about something much bigger: how Google is now effectively “crawling” the real world as it has crawled the web for…

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Google Places Bulk Management Tool Integrates New Google+ Feature

Google announced new updates to its Google Places bulk location management tool this week, including a new Google+ social feature. From Googler Jade Wang’s announcement in a Google Product Forum: Each location in upgraded and verified accounts will have social features automatically enabled….

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