Google Local locates neighborhood stores and services by searching billions of pages across the Web, then cross-checking those results with Yellow Pages data to pinpoint the local resources you want to find. This innovative approach gives you access to the most – and most relevant – results for your search. To use Google Local, just include a zip code or the name of a town or city with your regular search terms at www.google.com. Your local results will appear at the top of the results page. You can also go directly to the Google Local home page to view only local results, see results on an area map, or limit your results to listings within a set distance from your starting point. ... For now, Google Local only searches for locations in the United States. We plan on expanding this service to other parts of the world once we work out the kinks in this beta product ...
John Battelle's take:
Today, Google launched a number of significant upgrades to Google Local, Google's local search service. These enhancements and new features are a result of Google's continuing effort to develop Google Local and make local information even more accessible and useful. The new improvements include:
- Enhanced user interface - a new, cleaner design that now includes maps on results pages displaying the location of businesses in the search results
- New mapping capabilities - users can now zoom and pan different directions on the maps without reloading the page
- Improved comprehensiveness - search results provide links to even more web pages like business homepages and related ratings and reviews
- More relevant results - improved relevance technology returns even more precise results
These features build upon the core technology of Google Local, which combines traditional business listings with relevant information from across the web. This innovative approach does not rely on pre-determined categories and enables Google Local to provide local information that exactly matches a user's search. For example, a woman in Palo Alto, Calif. could be looking for a restaurant but is on a budget. She would have trouble finding listings that provide this information in the yellow pages or on other local information sites. However, by simply searching for [cheap restaurants] in [Palo Alto] on Google Local, she would find a number of nearby restaurants to fit the bill. Google Local achieves this level of relevance by searching restaurant reviews and other related web pages, in addition to business listings, to return results described as [cheap] on the web.
