Google Expands Maps Into Much More of Africa
Google is expanding Google Maps into 30 African countries where it was not previously available.
“One of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about at Google is how we can make the world’s information more accessible and useful to people all over the globe,” Google says. “This includes providing rich local geographic data because, after all, a huge number of search queries have a geographic component. Our efforts to start putting Africa on a map kicked off back in 2009 when we announced the launch of Google Maps for Kenya. Not long afterwords, we announced that users across 45 African countries could build and edit maps in Map Maker. Most recently, we launched Google Maps for South Africa.”
With Google Maps launching domains for 30 more countries, that means not only scenery and roads for these countries, but also local business listings, which can drive a lot of business to brick and mortars. Search engines have all but replaced print yellow pages for many people, and businesses in these countries should feel the effects of that as the listings grow.
Google is encouraging users in the new countries to get involved and help them make the maps better. “You know your local area better than we do, which is why Map Maker is on offer. With Map Maker, any user can create or edit map data, ranging from schools to local businesses, national parks to taxi stops. If you know your local area, or you’ve seen something that’s missing, take up the opportunity to get mapping! As we’ve pointed out before, maps are also invaluable for governments, NGOs, universities and entrepreneurs, who can visualise, plan and market the areas and projects that they work on.”
Including islands there are now over 50 African counries with Google maps available.
Grading Google’s Marketing Practices Based On Google’s Standards?
The following is a guest post by Slaven Radic.
The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece.
In short, when you logged into your Gmail account Google simply took all of your frequent contacts and mashed them up into an active social network without much input from people they were connecting. If you exchanged a lot of emails with your editor and your under-cover sources from the same Gmail account, now they were connected through your public profile if you didn’t happen to catch the Buzz opt-out checkbox. Or what about using the same Gmail account for emailing your husband and your boyfriend? Well now they’re introduced – you’re welcome.
Yes, sounds like a pretty naïve and reckless way to implement a major feature but Google protested that they just wanted to help and meant no evil. After all, their CEO Eric Schmidt had an interesting take on expectations for privacy online: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. That was said nary two months before Google Buzz launched – I guess people like Harriet Jacobs and her abusive ex-husband just didn’t listen.
Oops, Our Bad: Thanks For All the Users…
Since the launch, Google has done an amazingly quick about-face and pledged to do better. The latest set of changes make signing up for Buzz a tangibly more transparent experience, probably what it should have been at launch time. The press has mostly applauded their quick response and patted Google on the back for their responsiveness and keen focus on Gmail user experience.
But let’s see what Google’s naiveté about privacy issues meant for Google Buzz:
- 9 million posts and comments
- 300,000 mobile check-ins per day
- Buzz already rivals Twitter for sheer network size
Those are some pretty impressive numbers for any online launch, but to achieve this in under three days is just unheard of. Actually, there are businesses that do generate this level of interests from their prospects in that short of a time-frame and Gmail deals with them on a daily basis: spammers.
The ‘9 Million-Post’ Question
The question is did Google simply make a “mistake” and not consider these fairly serious privacy issues, or did the massive amount of spam Gmail churns through each day actually demonstrate effectiveness of a new business model?
The former is hard to believe when you consider the army of privacy lawyers Google has and their job to review privacy considerations in revenue-generating AdSense programs. This is especially critical in Gmail, where you are shown ads based on emails you exchange. Gmail achieves this by reading through all your email and matching you up with advertisers interested in addressing your daily struggles. After the initial outrage over this concept a few years ago most users have resigned to trust Google that they have their best interests in mind.
Your Trust, Google’s Toilet Paper
Google Buzz violates this trust in a serious way. In light of Google’s experience in this field, it is hard not to take Google’s mea culpa with a huge dose of skepticism. After all, if Google had made Buzz an opt-in service – something that users had to enable rather than be tricked into joining – they would be just another social network trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter.
Leveraging millions of Gmail users was a shortcut simply too tempting to avoid. The fact that Google decided to revise Google Buzz activation process over the weekend is simply a red herring: they only needed a few days to convert some of the hundred million plus Gmail users into millions of Buzz users, and become the de-facto Twitter competitor over a single long weekend.
Google “fixing” this privacy snafu a few days later is equivalent to spammers adding an “Unsubscribe” link to an email that’s already done its damage.
The strong impression from the last few days is that Gmail users were a pawn in a very cynical game: Google trying desperately to become a player in the social networking space, after the Orkut launch and their acquisition of a handful of other companies in this space failed to produce results.
We’re Not Evil
This is a tough act to pull off when your motto is Don’t Be Evil. It’s been said that eventually Google’s shareholders will push it to make product moves and decisions that end up hurting its brand in a quest for monetization. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out of this with their motto intact.
Google AdWords Tax Calculator
Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system…optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google’s yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don’t yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.
To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator – a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.
Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.
Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google’s products, our calculator is starting out in beta 
Yelp Not Being Acquired by Google
Update: Reports now say that Yelp has backed out of the deal.
Original Article: Multiple reports say that Google is in negotiations to acquire Yelp, a site that caters to reviews of local businesses. Mike Arrington claims to have confirmed this with “multiple sources,” and says the price is at least $500 million.
Yelp has an interesting page in which it squashes 9 “myths” about the service. Yelp says you don’t have to buy advertising to rank highly in Yelp search results, and that the only paid reviews are in clearly-marked ad form. Apparently a common myth is that Yelp reviewers are all young, and in high school or college.
“In January 2009, 94% of Yelp reviewers were over 23 years old,” says Yelp. “This means about 6% of reviewers fall into that ‘high school or college age’ category.”
Yelp.com had over 26 million unique visitors in the US in November. According to Yelp, people have written over 8 million local reviews, with over 85% of them rating a business 3 stars or higher.
Let’s remember that nothing is final yet, and there is still a possibility that Google will not acquire Yelp. According to Arrington, one source says the deal is 80% likely. Take that as you will.
Related Articles:
> Yelp Releases A Blackberry App
> Yelp Controversy Highlights Trouble With Consumer Reviews
> Yelp Branches Out With UK Site
Product Extensions for U.S. AdWords Advertisers
Google has just rolled out a new feature of AdWords – product extensions which shall be available for all U.S. AdWords advertisers. Product extensions are new ways by which you can add more relevant and specific information to your Google product ads.
AdWords’ product extensions let you use your existing Google Merchant Center account for highlighting products directly in search ads, so that when your AdWords text ad appears and your Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, it will display images, titles and prices of your products in what Google calls as plusbox located under your ad.
Succesful transactions resulting from AdWords product extensions are charged to your account on a cost-per-click basis. Meaning you won’t be charged if a user simply expands the plusbox and did not click through your site. Product extensions could improve your ads’ CTR (clickthrough rate).
In addition, since product extensions are charged on a CPC basis, it will only display if your ad is triggered by one of the keywords in your product extensions enabled campaign. You can even select which products are to be displayed when a user’s query triggers your ads.
To add product extensions to your Google AdWords ads, simply log in to Google Merchant Center and add your AdWords customer ID to your Account. Then visit the campaign settings tab under your AdWords account and click on the “Ad extensions” option. You will then nee to select “Use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center account.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Product Extensions for U.S. AdWords Advertisers