Google officially announced http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-closer-to-your-customers-with.html business profile pages on their nascent social network Google+ last night.

With 40m profiles so far, Google+ has potential – although there is healthy debate about who is actually using it outside of the digital, technology and broadcasting industries. Debate aside, we’ve dived straight in and set up a page for a UK business. Here’s our initial tips and feedback after a few hours using the platform:

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Google are carrying out what seems a test of their local results – Google Places – within UK results for “car insurance” today. This will have an impact on the traffic advertisers receive for this high-volume term, which is often used at the start of consumers research cycle.

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When I first saw coverage of this story on Techcrunch this morning, I had to check the date wasn’t April the 1st. Sadly, the headline is true – over-night a self-published guide called “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure” entered the top 100 on Amazon.com – and, no surprise, the retailer then pulled the title from the website as Twitter users, Techcrunch and other media outlets began to whip-up a understandable storm of controversy and started a boycott on Facebook. Read more »

Many digital marketers are running their daily reports this morning in Google Analytics and double-taking in surprise when it appears they received no site visits or conversions yesterday Tuesday, 2nd November. Read more »

After three days living without Google I’ve had a flavour of what a world where Google never existed would be like. On day two I tweeted: “Google Search is like fingers; you can get along without them, but everything is more difficult”. Something I’ve depended on and taken for granted has suddenly disappeared, and everything was just a bit more difficult and at times, damn frustrating.

So if Google had never existed, which companies would have prospered?

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For the next 3 days Duncan Parry is living without Google and blogging the experience here and on Twitter under the tag #lifewithnogoogle.

A few weeks ago a rare event happened: Google stopped working. For thousands of UK searchers, the search engine and many related websites went down for a few hours. This prompted me to wonder what a world without Google would be like – so I’m going to find out. So from Thursday, I’m going Google-free.

I’ll be blogging my experiences here, and commenting on Twitter with the tag #lifewithnogoogle.

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Google’s announcement that it was showing consumers search results as consumers typed was big news in both the industry and mainstream press. Duncan Parry of Steak looks at what the technology actually means for brands and consumers – and if brands should be changing their search strategies.