Filed under: Web services, Google
Google adds paid links to Google Local maps
Yesterday Google expanded AdSense advertising in a direction long expected by many: Google Local. Now for certain
searches you may see unfamiliar icons on your maps which, when clicked on, will display paid advertisements for Barnes
& Noble or Ralph Lauren, for example. You can see an example here. According to CNet the ads will only show up on Google.com, and
not in mash-ups created by third parties, and that analysts are expecting much more interactivity in the future, as
videos or live chat in the ad bubbles, though Google says no such features are currently planned. As the ad icons
themselves are small and unintrusive and currently the volume of ads is very low, and I suspect Google will keep it
that way by restricting the number of ads per keyword (which will in turn drive bids way up), I don't really have a
problem with the new ads and some users will probably even find them useful.
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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gardiner Westbound said 4:46PM on 3-31-2006
I was trying to figure out if Mapquest or Google is my preferred choice. This makes it no contest. Mapquest it is!
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Reader said 5:33PM on 3-31-2006
I definitely prefer Google's easy to use maps with tiny, unobtrusive ads to Mapquest's ancient mapping interface. Now, if you said Yahoo! Maps Beta, or even Ask's maps (which look amazingly like Google's), then you could at least debate it...
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Liam said 3:44PM on 4-01-2006
To be honest, I didn't expect you to have any problem with whatever Google releases...
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