The Sandbox+ API testing environment is currently undergoing an upgrade to bring it on par with recent enhancements in our Production environment. It should be back online later tonight. Apologies for the inconvenience. Jeff Dillon,

Google is now including reviews from more sources on its Place Pages for businesses. They're no longer coming from just review sites. They're coming from news sites, blogs, and more. Mike Blumenthal, who writes for the Understanding Google Maps & Local Search blog, has an in depth analysis of this change and received confirmation on its existence from Google Maps Product Manager Carter Maslan.

A newly proposed law in New Jersey would allow residents there to gamble online via websites run by the state's casinos in Atlantic City. The bill was introduced into the New Jersey senate by Senator Raymond Lesniak (D-Union), who also introduced a separate bill which calls for New Jersey residents to vote on a constitutional amendment that would allow state-regulated sports wagering in Atlantic City casinos, and to state residents via an intra-state Internet gambling system.

At least in certain parts of the world, Google has revised its approach to connecting people with security products. Avast Free Antivirus is now included in eight different versions of the Google Pack bundle of software. Try to download Google Pack in Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish, and you'll see Avast's logo among symbols for Chrome, Google Earth, Picasa, and a handful of other things.

A little bit of data from the Efficient Frontier Q4 2009 Search Engine Performance Report has been made available, and it's completely un-shocking in that it shows search marketers are still more than happy to spend their money with Google. The interesting thing, though, is that Bing seems to have gained a little ground on the search giant.

It appears that not all is well (or at least normal) at Baidu. Last week, the company's COO abruptly resigned, and today, its CTO followed suit. Both men cited "personal reasons" for their departures, and Baidu's made little other information available. Either exit might have been considered unremarkable on its own. The COO, Peng Ye, left before Google made its big statement about China, and also before hackers attacked Baidu,

It was recently discovered that search engine/news aggregator NewsNow.co.uk had been blocked by Times Online , a publication from News International, a subsidiary of News Corp. This has been viewed as a possible beginning to what News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has been talking about for quite some time - blocking search engines and aggregators from using its content (and using apparently includes linking). Do you think linking is a right? Share your view .

hakia's new site, NoBrandSearch.com , is an attempt at offering up a blind "taste test" of search results . The idea is that users should be surprised that their choice isn't Google all the time. Likely, hakia is hoping that its own search engine is chosen most of the time. Each time you search, two sets of results are provided. They're chosen from four search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing and hakia. However,

Bing Maps has updated their imagery of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti to reflect current conditions in the wake of last week's earthquake. Their imagery comes from Digital Globe's new Worldview 2 satellite. In addition to the damage,

As social networking becomes increasingly widespread, more employers are using these sites to screen potential employees. More than half (53%) of employers reported in a recent CareerBuildere.co.uk survey that they use social networking sites to research job candidates. Another 12 percent plan to start using social networking sites for screening. Among employers who conduct online background checks of job candidates, 43 percent use search engines,