This is huge for SMBs. AdWords now has the ability to target locally, just right before people leave their homes to go shopping, having searched on the web first.

With the new location extensions, ads can be target based on a user’s location and search terms.

Mark my words: Real-time + Personalized search + local targeting will redefine commerce.

After asking last month at Google Portugal when street view would become available, they finally unveiled the map feature for the two major cities in Portugal, Lisbon and Oporto.

Now, time to start peeking and find those awkward situations, like the one below at Parque Eduardo VII (you’ll get the joke if you’re familiar with Lisbon).

This should probably be one of my silliest posts, but since serendipity doesn’t come that often, i might as well share it. So here it goes:

If you’re looking for a city, where does Google Maps take you by default?

Running a couple of queries brought some interesting results:
(zoom in to street level, for better view)

Lisbon, Portugal

This was actually what took me down the rabbit hole, as it’s a long stretch to consider Praça do Comercio as Lisbon’s city center.

New York

Times Square is a a pretty good choice, Downtown Manhatan would do fine also.

Paris, France

Right next to the city hall. I was expecting Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe.

San Francisco

Van Ness Ave w/ Market St‎. What were you expecting now? Alcatraz?

London, UK

Another strange choice, next to the Parliament Square.

Rome, Italy

The placemark sits right in front of Il Vittoriano, on Piazza Veneza. No Colloseum for you.

Madrid, Spain

Puerta del Sol is a pretty busy city square, but celebrations usually take place at Plaza Cibeles.

Mountain View, California

And of course, Mountain View, placed next to Google’s corporate headquarters.

This seemingly useless trivia is actually important, as businesses get ranked in Local Search according to their proximity to the city center. If you’re an hotel, entertainment or tourism related service, you’d better start caring how Google Maps sets their city placemarks.

So, is your city center the same as the one suggested by Google Maps?

The newest update on Google’s free analytics package has now support for Portuguese. As with English US-UK, we’re also used to this double localization, one for Brazillians and other for Portuguese, so it’s good news for us Europeans to have a dashboard in our mother language.
You can select it from the Language pulldown menu on the Analytics Settings–>My Account page.

While webmasters and data strategists are fine with the English interface, it will be useful to Portuguese clients that aren’t familiar with most of the terminology. For someone who spent 3 hours yesterday explaining the dashboard and main features, i surely welcome this addition.

Speaking of the other Google Analytics updates, you might want to update your code to the new ga.js javascript include and take advantage of the latest functionalities, like the one that allows the tracking of ecommerce transactions.

Google launches knols, a Wikipedia killer, and amongst other features an interesting one:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Is this another setback to dead-trees media? If authors have a substantial revenue share on a knols page, they might even consider writing for the web.
One thing i’m sure: authors have earned their recognition as the most important source of knowledge, and if they choose to abandon the academic walled gardens, then Google will be one step closer to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.