Advertising on Google Local

David Galbraith has noticed Google testing out what he calls 'adballoons' on Google Local.

Searching for hotels in New York brings up a pair of blue sponsored links for two specific hotels ('W Court Hotel' and 'Courtyard Manhattan Hotel'). Clicking on these brings up the balloon on the map.

nyhotels

By comparison, searching for hotels in San Francisco brings up a generic sponsored link for 'San Francisco Hotels' which takes users to a new page.

sfhotels

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of hReview

microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p...
Read more

SmartLink

Image
In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t...
Read more

Google I/O 2013

With Google I/O approaching it is time to start speculating... Last year the keynotes at Google I/O were very different in tone; the one for Android and the one for Chrome OS. It will be interesting to see if there is any big change this year, now that Sundar Pichai will - indirectly - have a role in both. Google's commitment to the web and the evolution of Chrome has taken them to an extraordinary place.  Soon it will be possible to develop apps using standard web technologies and deploy them to a wide range of environments; desktops running OS X, Linus or Windows as well as Chrome OS. There seems to be a genuine desire to get Chrome apps to play nice in their host environments, not just within the browser. For example the launcher that was part of Chrome OS now has a variant in some desktop environments. The Chromebook Pixel has a touch screen, so developing Chrome apps for a touch interface is clearly on the agenda. So isn't it about time for Chrome apps on Android...
Read more