Author Information Results with Google Plus

We know that Google has been integrating author results in the main search for a while and late last month tweaked those results with the addition of circles . But Google is now linking the Author Information image in the main search directly with recent Google Plus posts in a results much like the Plus Places integration seen earlier in the week. Unlike the local results which were in Places but not the Main results, this integration is occurring in the main search results.

To see the results search on an author with author information like Matt McGee and then click directly on the author photo to see the integration with the Posts in the search results:

Google Earth 6.1: New features to explore your world

 

The Google Earth 6.1 update includes enhancements to make Google Earth easier than ever for both everyday users and business professionals.

Easier to use My Places
If you’re like me, your growing collection of maps in the My Places panel is getting a bit unwieldy. Every time I find a great new map or upload a new GPS track, it gets a little harder to find things. With this release, we’ve added a couple of new features to help you clean house a bit and find things more easily. First, we’ve added the ability to sort a folder – just right click on any folder and choose “Sort A-Z.” We’ve also made our My Places search feature easier to find; now all you have to do is type in the name of a map or a feature and it will highlight in the My Places panel.

You can now sort your My Places folders to improve organization.

Improved Street View
Building on the improvements we made to the Street View experience in Google Earth 6, we’ve now added even more Street View features, including better zoom control through the slider tool and a wider field of view similar to Google Maps. You can now also navigate from one place to another with just a single-click of the mouse. These features make Street View in Google Earth more immersive, while performance improvements create a faster, smoother overall experience.

Street View in Google Earth now has a wider field of view.

Google Earth Pro
While these features are available to all of our users, much of the work we’ve done in Google Earth 6.1 benefits power users and professionals who use Google Earth Pro, including:

  • Enhanced print layout: Pro users can now include scale bars and directional arrows when printing, making it easy to include all relevant information in client presentations.
  • Simplified movie maker: It’s now easier to convert saved tours to video and record live actions from the 3D viewer to really bring your presentation to life.
  • Expanded data styling: Control up to 64 unique style attributes for imported datasets.
  • Improved networking infrastructure: Earth Pro 6.1 received a robust network update, which offers better support for network proxies and SSL certificates commonly found in corporate networking environments.
  • Combined elevation profiles and ruler tool: We know that sometimes distance is only one part of the equation. We’ve tied elevation profiles into the ruler tool, making it possible to take into account the entire 3D environment when measuring distance.

Combined ruler and elevation profile tool used to measure Yosemite’s Half Dome Peak.

We hope these enhancements make it even more fun and exciting to explore the planet, wherever you are in the world. Download Google Earth 6.1 to get started.

The New Adwords Express

 

Google’s Adwords Express. For a business with more than 2 reviews and greater than an 4 star rating, it will show your star rating with the ad. One of the things I hate is that, unbeknownst to the business placing the ad, if the stars are clicked, it is a billable event and the searcher is taken to your Places Page NOT the web page that you had opted for when you purchased the ad.

 

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On the Places Page, the searcher is subjected to the normal indignities of seeing both additional ads AND a list of nearby competitors. Perhaps a reasonable trade off if the business was aware of the quid pro quo or could opt out, but neither is the case. Regardless it hardly seems reasonable that a business should be paying for the privilege of showing a searcher additional ads on Google.

 

There are a number of other issues I have with the practice besides the indignity of paying to have users to see more ads and learn about your competitors:

1- There are no analytics of the event. It is impossible to see how many ads that were clicked went to the Places Page instead of your website thus it is difficult to asses the value of the ad. A click on the stars shows in the Places analytic as an action and exactly the same as a visit to your website.

2- A corollary to the above is that there is no ability to track the campaign accurately. Since the click never makes it to your website there can be no measurement of conversions or goals in Analytics or the value of the click.

3- There is no indication in the Help files that you are paying when a user clicks on the star. I had to confirm the practice by contacting Google.

4- More importantly, as most Express users do not make it to the Help files, there is no indication in Places that your ad will show your review stars or that a click on them is billable.

5- When you place the ad, there is no indication that the user might be sent to your Places Page even though you explicitly selected the option for sending the user to your web page.

6-If a business has no reviews or a low star rating they are not paying this extra fee. How is that fair? Only better businesses are thus taxed?

With Adwords and location extensions you have the option to enable clicks to call. You pay if the searcher does in fact call. That is a reasonable option in that it is both a choice to turn it on or not and it is an event that is measurable and likely to lead to a conversion.

The other Adwords case where Google will show review stars is with the seller ratings extensions option. In that case you are also “automatically opted in to showing seller ratings with your ads”. (Where is a good copywriter when we need one? Does “opt” not mean choice? Oxymoronic at best.) In this seller ratings case however, when the searcher is taken to the product reviews, it is not a billable click. While it may disrupt your purchase funnel, the pros seem to outweigh the cons.

While a review highlighted Adwords Express ad is more visually attractive, the total lack of knowledge, control and tracking makes this one of those options that is easy to hate.