According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a cost, and its website boasts several business clients such as Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several automobile manufacturers.

The French court ruling requires Google to pay $660,000 (500,000 Euros) in damages and interest to Bottin Cartographes, along with a 15,000 Euro fine. That means Google’s total cost from the ruling is about $680,000.

A Google France spokesperson says the company is still studying the court’s decision and reviewing its options, adding that Google is “convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.”

As you can see from the related stories listed below, this is far from the first time that the French have raised legal issues with Google.

The “Local Paid Inclusion” service launched officially today. The site’s home page pitches:

Local Paid Inclusion is a Google, Yahoo and Bing contracted service and is offered as an approved official program in cooperation with those search engines.

Local Paid Inclusion promotes a local business’ profile page, like those found in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, into a top position on the search result page for up to 30 keywords per profile page.

This is a NEW program offered by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and 18 other major directories and indexes that places a business profile into a premium area above all other local profiles. Combine this with all of your other optimization programs to maximize your traffic.

What this means is local businesses that participate can essentially pay for the top local ranking position!

That copy reads like the type of email I’d normally delete as spam, if my spam filter didn’t catch it first. But since the service is backed by Bruce Clay, Inc. — a long-standing company in the SEO space — it really causes a double-take.

Clay dropped me an email late yesterday saying the service was going live, but I missed that (I have a lot of email I’m getting through) until some of the fireworks on Twitter erupted after his Facebook post went up and a story that Search Engine Watch did about the new service appeared

But Bing tells us:

Bing has no interest in paid inclusion into the local algo that artificially impacts ranking of algo results…. Microsoft does not have an agreement with UBL today.

UBL, for Universal Business Listings, appears to be a company that Clay is working with on the Local Paid Inclusion product.

As for Google, it tells us:

We are not working on any program that enables a site to pay to increase ranking in organic search results.

I’ve asked Clay for a further explanation, and we’ll update, when we hear more.

Postscript: Clay’s told me that he’s taken down the site while he investigates things further with UBL. Again, we’ll update, when we hear more.

Suffice to say, the claims are pretty unbelievable to me. I’ve also been seeing a lot of discussion about this on Twitter. So, in hopes of perhaps calming some concerns….

The idea that any one of these search engines would guarantee placement outside of their clearly marked advertising areas is pretty far-fetched. It’s not the way they’ve operated. The idea that all three would unite to do this in cooperation with an third-party company? Crazy.

So anyone believing this, or worrying about it, I’d relax. The denials above should be enough to do that, but they clearly aren’t for some people. But rather than the search engines having gone insane, it’s more likely there’s some massive confusion going on between UBL and Bruce Clay, Inc.

I get the impression that UBL — which I’ve never looked at closely — may provide data into local listings at the major search engines. Many companies do this type of thing. It doesn’t provide them any types of super-ranking powers. Some companies may try to stretch these type of relationships into some sort of endorsement by the major search engines. They shouldn’t be taken that way.

I get the impression (and this is solely my impression from afar, looking at all this), that Bruce Clay, Inc. is confused about what UBL can actually provide.

The idea that any company is going to guarantee an organic result simply makes no sense. It would be especially tricky in the local space. Google’s local results change significantly based on the city someone’s searching from. It literally becomes impossible to guarantee any ranking in that type of situation.

Postscript 2: UBL has posted:

Universal Business Listing denies any association with articles and news reports about a “paid inclusion” business listing service. The company has made no such announcements or claims, particularly in regards to Google. It has no product announcements pending.

Bruce Clay Inc is a reseller of UBL’s existing business listing syndication service and is not currently testing any new service from our company.

The site itself didn’t make a connection with UBL over this service, but the Search Engine Watch article did — and Clay himself also suggested a connection when he emailed that he was checking things with UBL. So, I’ll check with them further, too.

Postscript 3: Doyal Bryant, CEO of UBL, has emailed me:

We have no program or service with Bruce Clay providing this type of service as we gave put out in our website.

He also said that he would follow up more tomorrow. So stay tuned.

Postscript 4 (Feb. 1): UBL has updated their earlier statement to add:

UBL continues to innovate and experiment in the area of business listing syndication, and this includes methods to directly feed data into publishers on a free or paid basis. There are several methods of listing submission deployed by UBL and other companies in the field, so this should not be surprising to anyone. Some of these are indeed in an “Alpha” stage of development. However, there is absolutely no discussion under way with Google, nor have we ever represented it so. Furthermore, it would be a massive leap and hyperbole to describe any of this as “paid inclusion” which we would understand to imply preferential placement or ranking

Postscript 5 (Feb. 1): Bruce Clay Inc has now posted a statement, saying:

Late Monday, we announced the service “Local Paid Inclusion,” which we said gives local merchants higher rankings in the Places and local search results in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. We believed that the service offering was finalized between our backend partner and the aforementioned search engines.

So far, we have determined that it is not a released program, made even more complicated by statements of confidentiality agreements that put the kibosh on further discussion. Bruce Clay, Inc. has ceased to engage in Local Paid Inclusion while we dig into confusing and contradicting statements.

We announced what we believed to be a legitimate program where Bruce Clay, Inc. was going to be one of several distributors of this service. Our understanding of this service was that it impacted the sequence of entries within the Places or local results in search engines. And within that separate area of the results, this service would validate local profiles, assuring those entries would naturally result in appearing higher in the local results.

There was misinterpretation of the information surrounding this service; mainly that it would impact the organic search results, instead of only the local results. We take responsibility for an unclear message being announced in an untimely manner, where specifics of the program were not disclosed and the messaging was jumbled.

Bruce Clay, Inc. also takes responsibility for the early promotion of the service Local Paid Inclusion without taking the extra steps to verify these contracts existed as we understood them. For that, we apologize.

We believed at the time that the offering was valid and acted accordingly. We did not collect money at this time, choosing to only set up a notification contact list dubbed “pre-registration” for when the program formally released.

Bruce Clay, Inc. has always been committed to ethical search engine marketing practices that work alongside the values of the search engines: to serve the end user and provide exposure to businesses. This program seemed to be a solid way for local merchants to validate themselves online and to have their companies be found.

At this time, it’s our highest priority to be as clear as possible on this issue with the business and search communities. Bruce Clay, Inc. is prepared to openly discuss this matter as best we can with media and community to be as transparent as possible.

We will make every effort to answer looming questions as soon as we know more, but please understand that we are forced to work within confidentiality agreements, and may be unable to talk specifics.

We are currently working to better understand all of the contractual agreements in place, if any, with those search engines regarding this service.

We also need to thank the various social communities and search marketers for their passion regarding this matter; the voices were heard loud and clear, showing there’s no lack of diligent, inquisitive and knowledgeable marketers and business people in our community.

In the meantime, Bruce Clay, Inc. has withdrawn Local Paid Inclusion pending our further research into this matter. And the site LocalPaidInclusion.com has been taken down while this issue is resolved.

Postscript 6 (Feb. 2): Chris Silver Smith (a board member of UBL) weighs in with his speculation about what happened. He says that the LocalPaidInclusion concept was largely a notion dreamt up and/or predicted by Bruce Clay.

The bottom line: It doesn’t appear that there’s any type of top-ranking program that existed with the major search engines.

How Bruce Clay, Inc. came to believe there was such a program, to the degree it constructed an entire web site to sell it, still remains fairly unclear.

For the iPhone-app study, just published yesterday, Mediative monitored eye- and click-tracking with 12 people in Canada. They ranged in age from 21 to 45. The participants were asked to find places to get a tattoo in each of several Canadian cities. Here’s the task as described by Mediative:

Every participant in the study was given the same scenario as in the previous Google Places study – an imaginary road trip with stops in Hamilton, London, Winnipeg and Edmonton, with the task of choosing a place for a friend to get a tattoo in each of those cities based on the Google Places search results. From the participants in the eye tracking part of our study, we recorded each individual session, and then compiled the sessions to create heat maps that represent aggregate gaze data and supplement the qualitative findings.

Screen size was a critical difference between the PC and iPhone studies. Beyond this Mediative found that images and reviews were very important in capturing users’ eye movements and clicks.

The image on the left shows yellow bubbles of various sizes. The larger the size of the bubble, the more time the eye spent in that area of the screen. The numbers represent the progression of movement of the eye across the screen during the first several seconds. In other words the eye spent the most time on an image on the right, which was nearly the last thing considered in this sequence.

On the right screen above, red indicates more time spent and green less time spent. The second image in this case got the most attention among the three images. Mediative explains: “It’s the only image on this screen of a tattoo; both the other images are of storefronts.” Thus the image was directly relevant to the searcher’s objective: find a tattoo vendor.

As a general matter, people on the iPhone app scanned left to right and then down the page, not unlike eye-tracking patterns on the desktop. According to Mediative, reviews were an especially significant factor in eye-tracking patterns in the iPhone test:

People typically start looking in the upper left part of the screen, scan from left to right, then move down to the next result, and scan from left to right again. However, given the small space of the iPhone screen, some people will have their attention pulled to the right to look at an image, and may continue a scan down to the next image, before resuming a left-to-right scan pattern. If they start scrolling down, then their gaze will stay on the left side until they hit a listing of interest. In the examples we used in this study, in almost every case it meant that they would scroll down until they hit a listing with a better than 3-star review.

What Mediative observed is that where there were fewer “social signals” (e.g., reviews) among the top results users went further down the page to find places that had not only reviews but at least three stars. According to the report, “This presents an opportunity for businesses whose websites are not listed at the top; they can be more competitive by adding positive reviews.”

Mediative offered the following conclusions and recommendations:

• Reviews and other social signals grab attention: “If a business website is listed in any position other than the top three, and the listing does not include any social signals, it will be relatively ignored, especially if there are other listings that do have social signals.”
• Reviews drive clicks: “Positive reviews on the Google Places iPhone app were the biggest single factor we observed that determine which listings got clicks and which did not.”
• Volume of reviews matter:  Mediative found “that 29 of the 47 clicks went to listings that had at least four reviews.”
• Images matter too: “People . . . look at the images to see if the business looks trustworthy.” The type of image may matter as well: “We recommend giving the image that accompanies a listing some special consideration, and remember that an image that might work on a desktop might not work so well when reduced to a phone.”

You can download the entire report here (registration required).

Related Entries

• Eye-Tracking In Google Maps: Study Shows Value Of No. 1 Ranking & Social Content
• Eyetracking & SEO: Fad, Fact, Or Fiction?
• Eye-Tracking Study: Everybody Looks At Organic Listings, But Most Ignore Paid Ads On Right
• Survey: 6-10 Local Business Reviews Required For Trust
• Survey: Local Reviews Gaining In Importance
• Eye Tracking Study Shows Importance Of Search Snippets

Local businesses that are interested in having interior photos taken can use the new Business Photos website to find a “trusted photographer.” The business owner and photographer are supposed to negotiate prices and schedule an appointment directly. After the shoot, the photographer uploads the images to Google and they’ll appear in Google Maps/Places “shortly thereafter.”

Google’s FAQ says that the business owner will not be able to review the photos before they’re uploaded to Google. But they can, after the fact, request that certain images be blurred (for privacy reasons) and request that the entire panorama be removed. The panoramas can also be embedded on the business’s own website.

Google says Trusted Photographers is currently available in 14 US cities, and in the UK, Australia, France and New Zealand. The 14 US cities currently showing in the trusted photographers directory are: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Francisco/Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, DC.

Google began shooting interior photos in early 2010, then formally launched Business Photos last May.

You can access it over at google.org/publicalerts. The map will load with a layer of data on top of it. You can search by location to see if there are any alerts in your area or just browse the alerts on the left hand side or on the map. The information is also available directly on Google Maps when you search for events in a location, such as [tornadoes in texas].

Here is a picture of zooming into a magnitude 2.5 earthquake near Cokedale, Colorado.

Clicking on the icon takes you to the alert’s details page that provides detailed information on that alert. From when the event happened, to where it happened, to where the information came from and what you can do about it.

The data comes from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS).

Related Articles:

• Send In The Clouds: Google Earth Adds Weather Layer
• Google Releases Alabama Tornado Destruction Images & Maps Of Tornadoes
• Google Suggestions Get Localized For Countries Around The World, News Alerts Improved
• Track Your Friends (And Yourself) With Google Latitude Location History, Alerts
• Google Maps Becomes A Mini-Weather Center
• Google Maps The Great Indoors (Android Only)

There are travel verticals that will allow users to look for hotels near landmarks or filter by distance from the “city center” (or centroid). And almost all of the popular travel search engines allow you to see the hotel location on a map. Google Maps itself will allow you to find a point or destination and then “search nearby” for hotels.

Yet Google’s “Hotel Finder‘s” new ability to filter hotels by travel time (by transportation method) is unique and quite useful. Although Hotel Finder is generally available for a broad array of destinations, Google says that transit time search “is only available in cities where we have partnered with local transit agencies to integrate their data into Google Maps.”

Here’s a practical use case: if you were coming to an SMX event in New York, for example, and wanted to be within reasonable walking distance from the glorious Jacob Javitz center where the conference is held you could use the tool.

Another example would be a family traveling to Southern California to Disneyland. You want to be within close walking distance of the “Magic Kingdom” but not pay the exorbitant prices of the hotels “inside the park.” It works nicely in that situation. Indeed, one can quickly conjure up numerous such scenarios and examples.

How is any of this all that different from “search nearby” or “distance from” filters? This difference is subtle but meaningful. Hotel Finder also allows you to simultaneously filter by price, ratings and reviews and hotel class.

What I don’t really like about Hotel Finder is the clunky the three-panel interface. But I’m sure that will improve over time.

In some respects Hotel Finder provides greater travel-search flexibility and options than more established travel sites. You can search for a specific attraction or destination without first specifying a city; for example: Disneyland, rather than starting with “Anaheim, CA” and then locating Disneyland, and so on.

As Google rolls out new features hopefully others will feel compelled to match them — and we’ll see an upgrade across the spectrum. If so Google will have done its job and made the market more competitive and user-friendly.

I’m also eager to see how Google will translate all this to mobile devices.

The impression I got is that Bing would control the presentation layer and search on top of maps but that the “guts” would come from Nokia/Navteq. At the time of the story Microsoft offered the following comment:

Bing Maps has utilized Nokia content for road data, geo-coding and routing services for several years, through Nokia’s Navteq vector data business, relying on the quality of its data for core location services. The Nokia/MS partnership will enable deeper collaboration in the future.

Pocket-lint now reports, following a conversation with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, that Nokia branding will soon be showing up on Bing Maps for mobile:

[W]e shall soon be seeing the Nokia brand name within other devices and not just the company’s own phones.

“You’ll starting seeing the word ‘Nokia’ on a map that you get from Microsoft properties over a period of time,” Elop explained to Pocket-lint in an interview behind closed doors at CES in Las Vegas. “Even if you are on a BlackBerry device, who recently said they were going to start using Bing Maps.”

Consumers probably won’t care or even notice but OEMs and the various enterprise partners using Bing Maps might. The context in which it might matter (and the example used in the article) is a situation like that of BlackBerry, which adopted Bing as its default mapping platform last year.

RIM obviously competes with Nokia, which will now get branding on its phones. I suppose however, this is no different than Google branding on maps on the iPhone (which Apple will eventually probably replace).

Nokia spent $8 billion to acquire Navteq in October, 2007 and presumably negotiated this branding deal (and all that it implies) with Microsoft as part of their Lumia-Windows Phone relationship. Nokia is also now behind the new Yahoo Maps.

Related Entires

• Bing Maps To Be Powered (Replaced) By Nokia?
• Powered By Nokia, The New Yahoo Maps Goes Live
• Apple Maps Inevitable As Company Acquires 3D Mapper C3
• Google Maps Vs. Bing Maps: Summer Vacation Planning Showdown
• Bing Demos StreetSide With Flickr Photos, Live Video & “Bing Sky”
• Microsoft vs. Google: Street Photography Rigs Compared
• Bing To Become Default Search (And Maps) On RIM BlackBerry Devices
• Bing Maps’ “Game Changer”: Hi-Res Aerial Imagery Coming To Entire US and Western Europe
• Bing Maps Overhauls Interface, Exposes Map Apps To All

To see it yourself, go to Google Maps and search for a city name or even a zip code. You will see a pinkish highlight around the border.

Based on your zoom level, as you zoom out, Google will highlight the whole area, not just the borders, in the pink color.

Again, you can try it for searches like [Mountain View, CA] or postal codes like [10010] but certain borders are hard to make out, like those in New York City.

Hat tip to Google Operating System for spotting this.

Related Stories:

• Google Maps Sports New Look & Feel
• Google Earth Builder: Enteprise Data In The Cloud (And On The Map)
• Google Maps Removes In-Traffic Travel Estimates
• Google Maps “Send To Car” Running Out Of Gas?
• Google Maps Image Sparks International Debate In Iran
• Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps

Hotels have been struggling for years to get consumers to come directly to them rather than various OTAs, middlemen and aggregators to whom they pay affiliate booking and lead fees. This is not the first such hotels joint venture effort. There have been several initiatives over the past decade that have met with limited or mixed success.

The functionality and design of the Roomkey site are very good. It’s not clear Roomkey is comprehensive enough to be truly competitive, however. For example, there are no consumer reviews and users don’t see all available hotels in a market.

Higher profile sites such as TripAdvisor, Kayak, Orbitz and numerous other “booking engines” represent formidable competition. Google itself is now showing hotel rooms and pricing.

According to Hitwise, Google Maps is the internet’s top travel site. Following the acquisition of travel booking platform ITA last year, Google has been incrementally rolling out more travel search features and capabilities.

Maybe it’s my bias as a longtime fan/practitioner of local search and SEO. Or maybe it’s because I’m mentioned as one of the sources/contributors. But more likely it’s just that this is an important search reference document, and that’s why I think that anyone interested or involved in local search should know about it.

David Mihm has published A Brief History of Google Places — an excellent historical document that covers back to 2004 when Google launched what was then called “Google Local,” all the way through the “Google Maps” days and now up to the current Google Places era.

Important milestones are separated into categories like “SERP/Interface Updates” and “Feature Releases.” And each milestone links off to an original source for background. In addition to the online document, it’s also available in several downloadable, infographic-style versions, too.

If you work or play in local search, don’t miss this.