Drury Lane is a fascinating street to walk along, even by the standards of any street in Covent Garden, London. It is within sight of the mighty mason temple of Great Queen Street, it is the home of one of the very few parks where you can find sparrows in London, the first of thousands of Sainsbury’s stores was opened there in the nineteenth century, a Turkish restaurant that a friend of mine claims it has a toilet with a mural with (very) explicit sexual images, a Brazilian venue with great concerts and music, etc.

But nothing prepared me to this:

The English have a distinctly liberal approach to funerals. In the Spanish version of this blog we marveled at the services of Motorcycle Funerals, for instance. But the name of the business in Drury Lane, Happy-Go-Lucky, is just the best I have ever seen for a funeral parlour, so far, anywhere.

A post on this blog about Camidoc ranks somewhere on Google for queries about the doctors service in North London. A query on Google will redirect to a results page with the URL:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=camidoc&channel=linkdoctor%2Clde1000032

I find channel=linkdoctor an intriguing section of the URL. There is no indication on the page that Universal Search, or hyperlocal features are applied on the page on Google.

This might be an indication of future plans of Google to introduce Universal Search for the category “Local health services” or similar.

Google ranks its ‘UK Cinema and Film Listings’ results on top of their results page for queries of cinema name and location, eg. Odeon Swiss Cottage. This is called in the jargon of SEO as a hyperlocal query. The website of the cinema, Odeon.co.uk, comes only in second position after Google’s result.

An interesting feature of this page is that there is no Google ads. In SEO terms, Google are redirecting 40% or more of the clicks on results back to itself by occupying the whole of the first result with an icon and extra height of content. Continue reading →