No folks that was not a typo.

‘Google’ and ‘phone support’ were used in the same thought as it relates to one of their free services. Normally I would be very skeptical about this kind of claim but in this case the source is non other than Mike Blumenthal. Let’s put it this way, if you can’t trust Mike to be telling the truth about Google Local changes (or least as close to the truth as Google will allow to be known) then you might as well hang up your local search hat and call it a day.

In a post from yesterday at Mike’s Understanding Google Places and Local Search blog he says

I don’t get Google Maps and,in particular, Google Local. There is SO much potential yet they seem hell bent on making information as hard as possible to find. As I have always said, many of Google’s products are ‘Engineered by engineers for engineers’ and since most of the planet is not an engineer, well, you can guess what kind of cluster results. There is hope, however, although it comes right before the freakin’ end of the world but at least they are trying!

Yesterday Google announced in its Google Maps Google+ account that the Business Photos that are being taken by a Google Business Photo Trusted Photographer like my friend in Raleigh, NC, Charles Register are getting prime real estate in the SERPs (search engine result pages). Take a look at the example below.

This is important because until this point in time Google has for some unknown reason really buried this valuable online business asset. There are few better ways to see a place before you go than these photos and they look really good due to the process Google requires their trusted photographers to go through to put them together.