Google Now Offering a Local Search

It's another upgrade-on-a-holiday for Google (and my, what a striking St. Pat's day logo.) Google has rolled out a local search option from its testing bed at Google Labs. You can try it for yourself at http://local.google.com/ .

The first thing you'll notice is that this new feature contains two query boxes instead of one. The first box is for keywords that you want to search for. The second is for US address, city & state, or zip code (unfortunately the area code trick doesn't work here.)

I decided I wanted bike information for Lincoln Nebraska. So I searched for the keyword bike in Lincoln Nebraska. I got what looks like 100 results -- unfortunately there's no result count --
with clusters of business types at the top of the page (Cycling:Bicycles, Cycling:Repair, etc.) Underneath that there's a table of results that includes business name and phone number, address,
and related Web pages.

(I don't like the related pages feature as it stands. The way the result is formatted it looks like the related search is the home page for the business listed, and it's often not. For example one of the search results is for "Blue's Bike & Fitness Center," but the first related page in the listing is for Superpages. Strangely enough if you click through to the "and more related pages" for
this listing, you will get a contact page for Blues Bike & Fitness Center, and the Superpages page as your FOURTH item. Wubba?)

You have the option of expanding or contracting your search by limiting results to within 1 mile, 5 miles, 15 miles, or 45 miles of your query location. You may also "Save Location" via a checkbox on the query page, but every time I tried to do that I got a server error.

There are a few caveats to the service. It currently only works in the US (though Google has plans to expand it later.) It IS in beta, and occasionally it sputtered when I tried to search. If you can't find your business in here and you WANT it to be in here, check the help page for where to send your contact information.

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