Here is today’s roundup of news related to local marketing and advertising, local media, technology, local commerce, consumer behavior and more.

With Go and 4-Star, Amazon Accelerating Push into Offline Retail (October 1, 2018)
LSA Insider: “Amazon opened its first cashier-free convenience store, AmazonGo, last year in Seattle. It now has three Go stores, with more planned for New York, San Francisco and Chicago. And according to a Bloomberg report, the company is seeking to have as many as 3,000 by 2021.”

Report: Half of Very Small Businesses Suffer Financial Losses from Website Hacks (October 1, 2018)
Street Fight: “Half of all the small businesses with five or fewer employees examined in a recent report by GoDaddy have suffered a financial loss due to website hacking, and for one in eight, that loss was more than $5,000.”

Pew: Internet adoption, social media usage have been flat since 2016 (October 1, 2018)
Marketing Land: “Use of social media and internet adoption more broadly are flat according to new data from the Pew Research Center. The organization found the percentages of users who own smartphones, use social media and the internet overall is roughly identical to 2016 figures, or even down slightly.”

Google confirms ‘small’ search ranking algorithm update this past week (September 29, 2018)
Search Engine Land: “Google has confirmed today that it made a “small” algorithm update to its search ranking system this past week. Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter “We haven’t had a major update of that nature, but we did have a smaller one this week.””

What Google Investments Tell Marketers About Its Search Roadmap (September 28, 2018)
MediaPost: “If marketers want to map the future of search, all they need to do is track the number of times company executives mention a technology, especially during earnings calls, words in patents, and hush-hush investments such as Google’s in Gradient Ventures.”