In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today’s in-depth look, “Geo-Targeting On The Engines,” and this week’s free tips and tools.
The world of pornography often mirrors the world of “respectable” publishing and content. For years the adult film awards in LA both mocked and aspired to be like the Oscars. Porn producers are also often tech pioneers, the most famous example of which is the adoption of the VCR early on for distribution. And many […]
Fires are burning again in Southern California, and the map makers are hard at work helping people know what’s happening where. Below, maps relating to the Corral Fire in Malibu: NOTE: For the latest fires, see this fire maps section of Search Engine Land, where any updates are listed. Los Angeles Times: Shows evacuation zones, […]
With the US about to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, how are the major search engines gearing up to support an onslaught of Thanksgiving queries? Let’s take a look at how you can use them, ranging from flight tracking tools to special "shortcut" or "smart answer" boxes leading to related information. Many people travel by […]
Microsoft took the beta label off Windows Live Services, a mix of desktop and Web apps that are part of the company’s “software + services” strategy to keep those promoting “cloud computing” at bay (e.g., Google). Reuters and eWeek have rundowns of the global launch, while Digital Inspiration complains about the launch of the Live […]
Looking for information about wildfires in Southern California and across the California in general? This page will guide you to what you’re looking for. NOTE: Since this article was originally written, there have been many other fires on a seasonal basis. The original story is below. For the latest fires that may have brought you […]
Yahoo has been building out much richer Shortcuts, rolling out new ones almost daily. Here are recent additions, sports and music, for example. Yahoo has also done this for some time with restaurant reviews (e.g., “Sushi, San Francisco“) and more recently travel (e.g., “London“). Locallytype noticed that some hotel searches are now starting to show […]
The L.A. Times writes about the issue of privacy and Google’s StreetView photography, in the wake of more cities getting StreetView coverage. It covers much of the same territory as when the service initially launched (here’s our original article). But the service has become one of the focal points in the discussion of the Internet […]
According to the Google Lat Long Blog, the search engine has added a feature to Google Maps that provides a realistic estimate of drive time in traffic at peak times or when there’s an accident.
Superpages becomes the second major local search destination to add video advertising after Citysearch did so recently (in partnership with TurnHere). Other local search and yellow pages sites with video include DexKnows (published by RH Donnelley), Smalltown, SavoyNewYork and MojoPages. And there are an increasing number of travel sites that have video as well.
The legal issues for Google’s YouTube continue. Here are some select stories over the past few days on YouTube and more legal issues Google has to deal with. NBC lines up against YouTube in copyright case from News.com reports that NBC Universal and Viacom requested in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to file […]
Citysearch, one of the more venerable names in local search, has relaunched its site with an updated look and other “new and improved” features, including video. Video is currently available for New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and has prominent placement at the top of the home page. It’s an ad unit for local […]
Yesterday’s Economics of Social Media (EconSM) conference in LA, the first event from the team at PaidContent, was an impressive debut, both in terms of attendance and the range and “quality” of speakers on the stage. I’m not going to attempt to summarize all the individual sessions; rather, I have some general observations and interesting […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
Jingle Networks’ free directory assistance (DA) service 1-800-FREE411 is slated this week to launch a new “category search” option, where you call to get matches of businesses in an area that relate to a category of interest (such as movie theaters in Los Angeles, or a dentist in San Francisco). To date Jingle has offered […]
“Company X could be the next Google” is a platitude often bandied about by financial journalists or investment analysts touting typically obscure companies that could, potentially, score success on a Google-like scale. Most companies never come close to achieving Google’s financial or commercial success, of course. But say you were interested in finding one of […]
Does the Internet really need another local restaurant review site? Yes say the founders of Boorah, a new vertical search destination and aggregator of local restaurant reviews. Boorah collects reviews from existing local search and content sites, summarizes and enhances the data and builds additional features on top.