Mountain View, California — In a bid to capture more advertising dollars from businesses located near people using its search engine, Google Inc., has refurbished the way it organizes and presents local search results, eliminating overlapping items, consolidating a variety of relevant information and packaging it within individual entries.
Along with the enhancements, Google has renamed its local search service as Place, and incorporated it as an option to the menu in the left-hand panel of the results page, Google plans to announce on today.
Google’s Place Search, once released globally by today, will empower Google users more information about local businesses, such as restaurants and dry cleaners, directly on the first results page, including a photo, review ratings and a snippet of a review from sites such as CitySearch.com or Yelp.com, as well as links to those review sites.
Specifically, Google is aware of 50 million places, and when a user enters a search term for instance “museums new york,” it now delivers you a new kind of search result that replaces a list of links with a list of mini-pages for museums in the Big Apple with a map on the right. Each mini-page has links to reviews around the web on sites like Citisearch and Yelp, as well as the address and phone number. The mini-profile also has a photo and a algorithmically chosen snippet from a typical review.
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Google will automatically choose the so-called Place search, rather than a general web search, if it thinks your query is about a place — something Place Search product manager Jackie Bavaro says accounts for about 20 percent of Google searches.
Laurel Tate, co-owner of Two Sole Sisters LLC, a small shoe and accessories shop in Boulder, Colo., says the new format could help small businesses like hers.
“When it populates and gives more information, especially for people who don’t know me, it gives my store legitimacy,” she says.
However, she wonders that not all businesses will share her enthusiasm — particularly those that carry poor reviews on sites like Yelp, since those reviews may be more readily accessible, she says.
More double-edged queries such as “soccer field” will screen through the main search, since the user could be trying to learn the official FIFA regulations for a soccer field, not find one to scuffle on. But Place Search remains an option for all searches, joining the left navigation on Google’s search results, alongside Images, Shopping, News and Video.
“We are now organizing the world’s information around places,” Bavaro said. “Each place is really its own results page, dynamically connecting web pages.”
“This is a basically a different way of showing local results,” said John Hanke, a Google vice president of product management, in an interview.
The move comes as Google vies for more local business ad dollars and faces increased competition from Facebook Inc., the social-networking service, and other sites.
“This is a piece of a much larger story for Google,” said industry analyst Greg Sterling, from Sterling Market Intelligence.
With Place Search and Boost, Google wants to tap into the big opportunity of better serving end users looking for information on nearby businesses, as well as attracting local advertisers, especially the traditionally hard-to-target small businesses, Sterling said.