Yeah, I was looking around Google Places trying to solve one of our clients inconsistent placement and I noticed 3 links just below the blue bar where the Print, Send and Link text links are located.

Google Places Breadcrumbs Screenshot

It acts like a ‘next and previous’ navigation on a gallery. This is a good move from Google since users will no longer have to go back and forth on maps and then places page. All they have to do now is to click on either of the links.

One more is that if you click on the link right above the business name it will go back to the maps result page.

The True Purpose of Google

For me, aside from better user experience. It is to avoid people from going back to maps mode which allows the users to move away from the Place Page. If you noticed, mos of the Hotel Place Page now has the ‘Book’ links which  shows several OTA’s with rates shown right away and a link to the hotels own website  as shown below on the screenshot.

A screenshot of Googles book now button

We know that Google is gearing for Hotel Price Ads which allows OTA’s to display their hotel prices. We don’t have the details yet but it looks like they are preparing the Place pages for this. So now, OTA’s and hotels will have to advertise on Adwords and Hotel Price Ads which will allow Google to get more profits, more eyeballs and help the hotel get more exposure.

Googles goal is to continuously improve user experience all through out the web  and also on their own website which I have no problem with specially that I am also a web designer so I love to see every website beautiful and functional.

I love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment.

I was doing a research on a niche that I’m interested in when I got curious on what’s the stand between Google and Facebook specifically in terms of traffic. We all know that since July of 2010 Facebook has taken Google’s crown on the most visited website (visits only not unique). Below is a graph that will show the data for both unique traffic and visits from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing – just for kicks.

Google still owns the most unique visitors:

Looking at the table below, Facebook seemed to have suddenly declined traffic:

Though I found an article from Mashable, it was last 2008 and happened to be on the same month of April ion which Facebook has declined. Also, we have to take note that presently all the big players have declined in traffic and Facebook was the most affected one.

If you have any idea on what happened, post them up on the comments.