Hola, amigos. Happy Cinco de Mayo. We’d like to thank the folks who showed up for Nate’s AMA on Wednesday. It was a good talk and we can confidently say that everyone who attended is glad they showed up. We’re doing it again on May 17 at the same time, 2 PM eastern. We’ve got…
Author: Mark Luckenbaugh
New Google Maps Features Coming Soon
How’s it going? Today’s blog post will be a bit briefer than it usually is. We’re at a tulip festival (of all things) right now, and we finished writing last night. If something newsworthy happened this morning, we’ll cover it next week. Nate, our CTO, will be hosting another AMA on May 3 at 2…
New Google Guidelines for AI-Generated Content
Happy Friday, everyone. Our staff has been pretty busy lately, but a lot of the stuff we’ve been working on is falling into place. Things are looking up for us. We hope all of you are also doing well. We had to delay the AMA with Nate (our CTO) that we had scheduled for two…
Cutting Down on Google Maps Fraud
Hello, everyone out there. We’ve learned a lesson this week, which is that it’s pointless to try to finish this newsletter ahead of time. Every time we’ve tried to do that, we always stumble upon something more interesting on Friday morning that replaces whatever else we had in the works. On that note, let’s get…
New GeoGrid Feature & Changes to GBP Metrics
Howdy, everyone. No time like the present to plug Nate’s next group talk. We’re going to hold it on April 19 (the Wednesday after next Wednesday) at 2 PM EDT. Nate’s our CTO. He’s been doing AMAs for the past few months. They start off with a new feature demonstration and then progress into a…
The Petition to Pause AI
Hello, everyone. We hope you’ve all been having a great week. For those of you who couldn’t make it to our group call on Wednesday, we gave a sneak preview of the upcoming auditing functionality that will soon be baked in to every Local Viking and Local Brand Manager account. We took a look at…
So Many AI Projects These Days
Greetings, folks. We had to push our AMA with Nate (our CTO) back a week due to circumstances outside of our control. That’s just how things go sometimes. You can register for his new talk on March 29 with this link. It will be at 2 PM EDT/11 AM PDT. Local Viking and Local Brand…
Microsoft Outshines Google Again
Hello, everybody. So many splashy things happened this week that fitting all of them into a single newsletter would be a challenge under ideal conditions. Today is far from ideal. We’re rushing to put this email together because we’ve spent the past few hours on the stupidest call in the history of Zoom. Every attempt…
GPT-4 and Google Ads
Greetings, everybody. We’re going to start this week’s newsletter with a rumor. GPT-4 might be coming out next week. That’s according to Dr. Andreas Braun, the CTO of Microsoft Germany (someone who would know). He casually mentioned it during a presentation yesterday. To put this in context, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, released in June…
An Internet Without Websites
Greetings, folks. We need to begin today’s email with an apology. We’ve been plugging AMAs with our CTO, Nate Fischer, pretty hard over the past few months. The one that was scheduled for two days ago didn’t happen. We didn’t show. It’s not Nate’s fault. You can blame this fiasco squarely on the newsletter staff…
Automatic Google Maps Updates
Greetings, everybody. We realize we’ve spent the past few weeks hyping up Bing Search. We would’ve bet against ourselves doing that as recently as two months ago. What a time to be alive. Anyway, we definitely have an interesting detail to add about Microsoft’s renewed incursion into online search, but we’ve got some Google Maps…
The New Microsoft Edge Browser
Greetings, folks. We’re sorry that last week’s newsletter reached you so late in the day. We had to wait on someone from Mailchimp’s only-available-via-email support staff to reinstate our account after it got suspended by an automated algorithm. We’d love to explain what happened, but that could actually trigger the same outcome. We’ll just say…
Big Bing Update & New Google API
Greetings, everybody. Today’s newsletter is long and has a greater level of detail than we usually give you. This week’s news kinda demands that. Microsoft made search interesting for the first time in 20 years a few days ago. We’ll get into that as soon as we remind you about our ongoing AMA series and…
We Added Video Functionality
Greetings, newsletter readers. Can we all just take a moment to agree that inflation sucks? Our modest handbasket of groceries rang up to $100.43 at Safeway the other day. It got us thinking. Uber costs more than cabs in 2023. AirBNBs are more than hotels. Streaming video services are more expensive than cable. How did…
Update on Malware Sites Appearing in Google’s SERPs
Greetings, readers. We have an announcement to start today’s newsletter. Our CTO, Nate, will be hosting another AMA session on Wednesday. You can register for it here. Participants are welcome to ask about local SEO, marketing, our GeoBooster mobile app– you can ask about anything, really. It’s up to you. This will be the fourth…
Apple Business Connect | Malware Alert
Hey there, everyone. The US State Department recently decreed that it will fully adopt Calibri as its standard font by February 6. To give you a quick history lesson, Calibri was the default font in Word 2007. Times New Roman, the font the State Department currently uses, was the default font in Word 2003. At…
Our Thoughts on ChatGPT
Howdy, folks. This week’s newsletter is a bit late because we moved from the US east coast to the US west coast on Tuesday. While time zones are a straightforward construct that can be fully grasped by ten-year-olds who understand the earth’s shape and the concept of rotation, we still managed to let them stymie…
2022 in Review
What a year. Many of us who grew up hearing about five-cent Coca-Cola bottles and $5,000 houses from our parents and grandparents are experiencing inflation for the first time. It kinda sucks. Overall though, our conclusion is that 2022 went pretty well. Sure, bad things happened. Millions of people in Ukraine might disagree with…
New GeoGrid Functionality
Greetings, readers. We’d like to wish all Local Viking and Local Brand Manager users a Merry Christmas this weekend, a Happy ongoing Hannukah, or a fantastic more-obscure holiday. As it turns out, we have a bunch of presents for everyone this week. There are many meaningful updates to let everyone know about. Nate described most…
Lots of Local Viking Updates
Greetings, everyone. Congratulations if your team/country/whatever won the World Cup. It’s over, right? It was impossible to do anything online without running into a billion Qatari construction horror stories for a while there, and we haven’t seen any of those in at least a week. We aren’t big soccer people at Local Viking, but we…