Google Labs Offers Google Search By Location

Google Labs has just rolled out Google Search by Location at http://labs.google.com/location . As you might imagine, it allows you to search the Web based on location.

The front page consists of two query boxes: a box for keywords and a box to provide an address, city and state, or zip. (Sorry, this appears to work only on the US at the moment.) The search result provides a map of where you're searching along with notations of where the search results are on the map.

I searched Oklahoma City OK for flooring and got 856 results. I thought I might get some weird results from this, but Google has actually done quite a good job with this. Results were for the most part relevant, though sometimes I had to actually visit the site to find the information for which I was looking.

A couple of times I tried searching for cities that Google apparently couldn't parse (Winston-Salem NC) and sometimes more common keywords led to less focused results (try searching for "books" in Los Angeles CA). But overall this is quite good, especially as a new app right out of the box.

Posted to Search Engines-Google