12 new patents mostly related to advertising and local search.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060711-205551

Google automates lot of things, like review extractions, AdWords ads approval, business address information.

Ionut, I hope that you will do a resume of this news on your blog because it's too complex and too long for me ;)

...and you haven't read the patents

Lots of clever stuff here. And yet Google still serves ads for the Eiffel Tower on my pages about the Eiffel Programming Language.

I was interested to see the "Transportation Routing" patent involves measuring traffic flow using wi-fi data, then using that to predict good routes to take. A technology implemented for one purpose can often be commercially exploited for other unrelated purposes.