Maps have long been important in politics, as anyone who works in politics or watches the TV coverage on election night knows. And then there's the familiar saying, "All politics is local." Now, as reported on the Google Earth Blog, Google Earth...
Google has long distributed its search engine on third-party content sites. But until today you could only search the individual site or the Web -- and the branding on search results was practically all Google. Now Google will allow site owners...
The NY Times has an extensive article today on Google and those who would challenge it in the courts. It offers a broad overview of the legal issues surrounding Google, including those coming with the YouTube acquisition, and the company's...
I hear lots of claims from startups about how they'll improve upon or do better than the competition. Most of the time, those claims don't prove to be true in practice. Of course if you didn't believe your own PR, why would you even try? Now a...
Ending several months of speculation Verizon announced yesterday that its SuperPages unit would be spun off as a separate company, to be called, somewhat awkwardly, "Idearc Inc." According to a BusinessWeek article the name is a combination of...
Citysearch formally launched its text-based mobile local search service today: CS411 (27411). There's also a send-to-phone feature (see, e.g., "Hotels, Burbank CA"). Doing the same search online vs. CS411 on a mobile phone yields somewhat...
Earlier this week J.D. Power and Associates released the findings of its "2006 Residential Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study." The study, based on a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. residential Internet users, found that Yahoo Messenger...
I'll resist the "maps in the palm of your hand" jokes here. But Google and Palm announced the launch of Google Maps for Treo smartphones. The site indicates that currently the application supports the Treo 600, 650 and 700 models. But I've seen...
The real estate vertical is one of the most interesting online segments for several reasons. Among them are the tools that have been developed amid intensifying competition. Two relatively new ones are Rentometer from iiProperty, a company...
Local media research firm The Kelsey Group just forecast "portal-backed wireless voice search [will] reach 1.45 billion queries in 2010" and cause "a significant disruption of the directory assistance market." On one level, this is self-evident....
It's real and was just confirmed. It's a stock transaction that will close in Q4 and will enable YouTube to operate independently. See below for the full text of the release. Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock Combination...
More and more directory assistance (DA) is starting to morph into voice-enabled mobile (local) search. This piece in the NY Times over the weekend describes a new deal between automated voice services company Tellme Networks and Cingular Wireless...
A few weeks ago Google introduced sponsored listings into mobile search. Yahoo followed last week. Now Microsoft has partnered with Ingenio to deliver pay-per-call listings into Windows Live Search for mobile. But unlike the other two programs...
Speculation about a potential acquisition of YouTube by Google is heating up. The Wall Street Journal reports and here's more coverage and buzz. Previously it was reported that Yahoo was in similar talks to buy the site. The rumor first appeared...
Despite a skeptical publishing community some publishers are seeing increased sales from Google's book scanning project. Reuters quotes several publishers as seeing increased sales. And here are the top 10 books on Google Book Search.
As a kind of twist on that old 60's mantra, social networking's slogan might have been: not for anyone over 30 -- or so we thought. As is being widely covered, comScore reported and MySpace apparently confirmed that the average age of its users...
Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott, who presented at SES Local, has posted some of the data she showed at the conference. In this particular example, what she compared was traffic to traditional yellow pages sites vs. directory sites that incorporated...
Honda has redesigned its bestselling CRV sport utility vehicle. There's a snazzy flash-based site featuring the new car and a user-generated/social media component there too. People can post their "craves." But this otherwise sophisticated...
Consulting firm TeleMapics is offering a free local search white paper, which you can get here. Called "Local Search: Time for a Tune-Up?," the document is 62 pages and provides a fairly detailed overview of the state of local search. For those...
Within the past two days LiveDeal has announced two significant relationships: one with jobs metasearch engine SimplyHired and another, today, with general classifieds aggregator/search engine Vast. Both sites will be providing all their...
