Google is launching a new dashboard feature today that allows business owners to see how customers find their website.
The new dashboard is called Local Business Center (LBC) and is a free tool that allows business owners to also control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps.
Business owners can take advantage of the new tool by claiming their listing in the LBC and going through a brief verification process. Once a listing is claimed, business owners will have access to the following data:
Time Spent On Facebook Up 700%
Research from Nielsen shows that time spent on Facebook is up 700% from a year ago (that’s April ’08 to April ’09). Meanwhile, MySpace has experienced -31% year-over-year growth.
Search Trends Spell Bad News For GM
Search trends tend to indicate what people are interested in; we all know about the swine flu spikes from a few weeks ago, for example. Unfortunately for General Motors, search trends now show that consumers may be even more averse to buying its vehicles than to catching the bug.
Location Adds Purpose and Context to Twitter
Knowing where people are tweeting from can enrich the Twitter experience in many cases. It appears that Twitter agrees with this, and has some wheels in motion.
Location can add context to a tweet, or to a conversation in general. More geo-information would serve only to make Twitter a more valuable tool. Dan Frommer says Twitter’s next project is location. He writes:
Errant Google Snippet Draws Lawsuit For Webmaster
Sometimes all it takes is precedent to fuel similar actions, so webmasters should be aware a Dutch court found a website operator liable for how a snippet appeared in Google’s search results, even if the appearance was the result of an algorithmic quirk.
Turkey Has The Most Engaged Internet Users In Europe
More than 17 million people in Turkey accessed the Internet from a home or work location in April, viewing an average of 3,044 pages per visitor, according to comScore.
Of the 17 European countries individually reported by comScore, Germany’s online audience was the largest with 40 million visitors in April, followed by the U.K. (36.8 million visitors), and France (36.3 million visitors).
Google’s AdWords Editor Gets an Upgrade
Google has released a new version of AdWords Editor. That of course means that there are some updates that come with it.
For one, advertisers can now import CSV files. Users who make changes to their accounts in a spreadsheet or custom application can import their spreadsheet directly into AdWords Editor, then post new or edited items. To import a CSV file:
China Blocks Everything Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary
The Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred on June 4th, 1989, and it appears that the Chinese government is going to mark the 20th anniversary in its own special way. Within the country, access to just about every major social media site has been blocked.
A Trending Topic on Twitter with No Results
Despite Twitter’s rapidly growing popularity, the service is quite known for downtime, and random bugs. In fact, the Twitter Status Blog usually does its best to keep the public informed about known bugs, but I have not seen mention of this yet.
While taking a look at the top trending topics on Twitter this morning, one of them (#inappropriatemovies)is giving me "no results" when I click on it. How can it be a trending topic if there are no results?
Search Google and Yahoo from Bing
There is still a lot to learn about Bing of course. Microsoft’s new search engine hasn’t been live that long. After reading the back and forth of Matt Cutts and Bing, I started wondering how Bing and Google were treating each other’s results.