Mike Blumenthal once again breaks the news on a new initiative from Google Places: the ability for business owners to respond directly to reviews. Google is not the first local search portal to come out with this product enhancement, but as arguably the biggest and certainly the most visible, it puts incredible pressure on the remaining stragglers to do so. It’s a great complement to the UI/link shift — allowing business owners even more control over their Place Page–and is a clear indication to me that Google is headed more in the direction of Facebook Fan Pages every day.

As reported by Mike Blumenthal earlier this morning, Google Places is now making phone calls to selected (random…?) Local businesses to verify their contact information. Sort of a virtual reverse check-in, if you will. This initiative seems to be a genuine effort by Google to decrease the spam in their Places index–the engineers’ hearts are absolutely in the right place here. I am all for as much human interaction with business owners as Google thinks is possible. But it’s frustrating to see such a good idea executed in this manner.

My thoughts on what the latest changes to Local results in Google Universal search mean for both SMB’s and IYP’s.

Earlier this morning, I published the results of the 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors survey. I actually added 20 questions to this year’s survey to try to assess some of the new considerations in Local Search–a daunting 30% increase in the workload for our panelists. We had 34 experts take part, including a handful of gurus from Canada and Europe and one from Australia. Their insights are truly remarkable, and although it’s a lengthy piece, I’d recommend getting into the full depth of the responses as soon as you have time.

Google Maps appears to have introduced another innovation to their interface recently: Zagat-like review snippets on Place Pages for individual businesses.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s SMX East recap, Google announced a new ad format–Local Listing Ads–on Monday afternoon.  Both Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal have written fairly in-depth summaries of what the ads entail but I’ll try to lay out the highlights below:

Only businesses with claimed LBC listings are eligible to participate.
The landing page MUST [...]

One of the more important news items of the Local Search Summit in San Jose will actually happen Friday in Mountain View.
It will be the last day at Google for Jen Chin, a.k.a. MapsGuideJen.  She’s leaving the smog and congestion of the South Bay for Graduate School in Environmental Management at a prestigious university on the East [...]

We’re going to go through the AMAZING day at Local Search Summit in reverse order; posts on other sessions will be forthcoming.  For those of you not in attendance, Steve Espinosa (moderating the session) just made fun of me for not liveblogging the session so here I am complying.  Because obviously fellow attendees haven’t made [...]

The Local Search world was abuzz when Google announced its rollout of a basic analytics package within the Local Business Center a couple of weeks ago. Clearly, certain powers in Mountain View are starting to sense the underlying current of frustration in the typical SMB owner’s world, highlighted by the recent Borrell study and Mike Blumenthal’s weekly (self-described) “snipes.” But are Google’s efforts to increase SMB awareness of and engagement with Local Search enough?

The analytics of the the Google LBC’s Rich Dashboard are certainly nice, and I’m happy to see Google continue to pour resources into the Maps and Local Business Center teams. But I’m not sure Google’s priorities are in order when it comes to where small businesses (and really, businesses of all sizes) are really feeling LBC pain. In this post, I lay out seven improvements I’d like to see the Maps team put some brainpower behind in the coming months.