The expansions continue at Google Transit with the addition of several more cities.

USA

Davis, CA - Unitrans (and their wonderful double-deck buses)
Rio Vista CA - Rio Vista Delta Breeze
Lubbock TX - CitiBus

Walla Walla WA - Valley Transit and Grapevine
Los Angeles, CA - coming soon!

France:

Bordeaux, France - Tram et Bus de la CUB services 27 municipalities via over 90 lines in Aquitaine, France.

top photo: Unitrans - City of Davis, CA,
Bordeaux Tram Photo by Baptiste Lafontaine used under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

It looks like Google Transit has a new look, and I like the new one better. The US Locations are now in one alphabetic list, with international locations listed on the right. It also adds time of departure or arrival to help with planning in a new simple box.

Old Layout:

Many times when working on articles, or doing research I’ll come upon posts, pages, or articles that look interesting, but after I click to them, I realize they are from 1999 or 2001. While well written, anything that happened that long ago is usually irrelevant to the search marketing and site design business. The Google Info View lets me limit the dates much like Google Blog Search. Nice.

Here today I checked out Google Alternative Views, which includes the ability to choose between several types of views - and significantly alters the search engine results pages based on your “mode.”

It looks as if there may be the need for a new meta-tag (e.g. like the currently valid ‘address’ tag) which helps pages identify dates, locations, etc, because most of the page results came back “No locations for this page” or “No dates for this page”.

The date sorting feature was slick in concept but I’ve not made it work very well. I wonder if new meta tags or sitemap tags will help to categorize pages into these buckets. The locations page was wonderful when you’re trying to get information relevant to the locale, but you’re not really searching for a local business. I searched for “Search Marketing Seminars” and chose Chicago as the “location” — the results were limited in a very clean way. It works like a filter - but I couldn’t quite pick out what it was trying to do. I had to do a lot of different searches before I found a good results page showing the feature well.

One usability issue… it’s easy to forget you’ve not entered a date yet. I think Google should either allow a default, or show “no” results until you’ve chosen a date, if you’re in that mode. The results that return when you’ve not entered a date are nonsensical. I’d like to see them pop a timeline on the left side like Google Blog search has - with a default.

It’s too early to say how this would affect SEO or how businesses might be able to make sure they rank for each of the data types - but it certainly adds some dimensions to the organic search space to consider down the road.

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I saw this myspace-promotion for the first time on a site-placement campaign, and if you click, it auto-adds myspace to your sites list for that campaign or you can look at myspace placements. I guess not enough people were advertising on myspace or perhaps it was just getting lost in the mix?

I’m pretty sure a lot of people will just click putting them into the entire myspace adspace. I hope people will at least think about the individual placements.

Clearly part of Google’s late summer deal with Fox Interactive, I’m guessing it will be tricky to convert unless you’re very careful on this unless you have a site marketing to 13-18 year olds and something free to offer them. Definitely need to approach this kind of audience with a new media plan that builds community rather than the traditional sales funnel.

My prediction?  Google will start offering free analysis/consultation on placing on the myspace network.

The small transit operator Fredericton Transit Division had their routes added to Google Transit tonight for the Fredericton (85k) area, adding yet another Canadian location for the terrific trip planning service. The University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University students in the area will surely benefit from this trip-planning service.

The City of Fredericton Transit Division operates 28 buses on eight routes, Monday to Saturday, 6:30 am until 11:00 pm, providing safe, affordable mobility to those in the community who do not have access to or choose not to use a private vehicle. In addition we operate chartered busing to various school, tour, and conference groups in and around Fredericton, and a parallel service , Dial-A-Bus, for persons with a disability.

Looks like Google Transit has rolled out Quebec’s AMT Service

I went to visit Agence métropolitaine de transport using Google’s link http://www.amt.qb.ca, but it had been hijacked! No wait. Google put ‘qb’ instead of ‘qc.’ Need to fix that folks. Should be qc…

Postscript: Google fixed the link.

AMT’s territory spans 63 municipalities and one native reserve, 13 regional county municipalities, and 21 transit authorities. It serves a population of approximately 3.7 million people who make more than 750,000 trips daily.

Google Transit expands once again as it announced inclusion of European locations from Italy to Switzerland, helping mass transit users efficiently move about! This is the latest in a series of changes recently including addition of Southeastern Virginia, Sacramento, and Vancouver BC.

Firenze (Florence) Italy and Torino (Turin) Italy (Gruppo Torinese Trasporti) - 90 million passengers every year.

Switzerland National (SBB, VBZ) - around 25,000km of mass transit.

Southeast UK including London (Traveline South East) - see this outstanding article about integration of UK’s public transit data into Google.

See also the post about this in Search Engine Land.

On my pay per click campaign summary I see this:

I’m not sure but this seems like the first time they’ve made specific traffic increase predictions. Here, they point out

Daily budget of $100.00 met on 13 of the last 15 days. Increasing your budget to the recommended amount would allow your ads to show 118% more often and get approximately 784 more clicks per month.

Yeah, more traffic. But is it the right kind of traffic? Only a watchful eye can tell that. Sadly, many amateur PPC marketers will just go with the recommendation without thinking.

The Logo From Google India - I’d never seen this before.

I’d only seen this one after finding it on pulse2.0

Yet another expansion on Google Transit.

Yesterday, they moved Japan to the top, so we knew something was up.

This complements Vancouver’s existing NextBus Info and Trip Planner services.

“….TransLink, the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority, is a small organization involved with transportation planning, administration of service contracts with subsidiary companies and contractors, the management of capital projects, financial management and planning, public affairs and supporting business functions. …”

They are having a celebration, and here’s the invitation.

image: wikimedia public domain