Patrick Altoft tells us about Google's "woefully" inaccurate geo-location tools in the United Kingdom, which puts a strain on anyone trying to use Place Search in the U.K. To demonstrate the woes, he provides screen shots and a real-life example of what happened when he searched for pizza.

By now we all know that Jerry Brown took the California governor's seat. Days before the race concluded, Laura decided to track how the state's candidates connected with voters through search and social. She looks at both's Facebook and Twitter strategies, and concludes they both "suck at cross-channel optimization," and their search tactics can use help as well. Specific, detailed examples abound in this long, thoughtful post.

There comes a time in a campaign when an SEO expert starts seeing diminishing returns from chasing every nuance in the search engine algorithms vs. building a solid, well-optimized Web site that performs well for both search engines and visitors, according to Stoney deGeyter. So, he tells us what's wrong with chasing algorithms and what it means to merge analytics with SEO.

Sometimes we just need charts to visualize differences. Greg Habermann uses them to show us the difference in features between adCenter and AdWords.

Aaron Wall tells us Google is replacing page titles in search results with on-page headings -- which means the search engine fills in the blanks from anchor text links when applicable. This makes the search results appear more relevant. It's something Bing has done from the start. Now, Google has begun experimenting with this option, according to Wall, who provides a few examples of how it works.

Eric Goldman points to a filing in which Google alleges that the U.S. Department of the Interior failed to seriously consider Google Apps when it put out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to handle its messaging needs. The DOI stated upfront in the RFQ that the solution had to be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.

Marty Weintraub tells us how to build a KPI tracking dashboard using Woopra. A combination of lots of screen shots and detailed descriptions walk us through the process of creating a comprehensive reporting system and analytics dashboard. Among the metrics you can track: Search Engine Conversion, KPI Conversion by Referring Site, and Conversion by Referral Type.

Navigating on a touch screen could become like taking your finger and drawing the first letter of a word. Bill Slawski tells us about a paper Google published recently that describes a method to navigate touch screens by tracing out alphanumeric characters. Several line drawings describe what Google calls "Gesture Search." Slawski believes this could make it easier to use Google Maps, especially on a phone.

For Halloween, Lopez crowd-sourced the scariest SEO mishaps, for which she suggests some solutions. She discusses sitewide de-indexing, theme and design issues, and hijacked backlinks, among other problems.