Google has just rolled out its local search results to worldwide coverage. What this means is that when you search for things such as restaurants or coffee shops, you don’t have to specify your location on the search query to get search results specific to your geographic location. Google Search will guess your location and present you with results specific to your local area.
How does Google Search do this? The Official Google Blog says, it guesses your location using user’s IP address. It matches this IP address to a broad geographical location and then selects the search results specific to the matched geographic location.
You can also filter your search results based on other location using the “Change location” link that will appear on the top right corner of the search results page.
It’s a simple search upgrade but could save you a lot of time when searching for area-specific information on Google search. And it’s pretty accurate too, when I tried searching for “restaurants”, the search results gave a localized results except for the Wikipedia entry that showed up as the first search result.
Awesome, A handy little update.
I wondered how long it be until they modified the local search algo.
Now, how will this affects local business advert previously optimised for smaller suburbs?
Nice post
a small update from Google but it doesn’t cover the IP matching problems. just covering the EMEA region must ISPs have fix hubs. That means that you will not have an exact match with the users region. e.G. Germany. A user in Munich use the ISP X who uses a hub in Frankfurt (Distance between Munich and Frankfurt: 400km). Every IP address will match with Frankfurt. If Google covers a wide surrounding area based on the IP address, let’s say 100 km, the user will not get back any Munich related ads.
There are some solution beside the classical IP targeting. I think united internet has developed a better coverage based on the data they have generated in their day to day business. This could be an interesting next article ;-)
It’s a nice feature to have, that’s for sure, but the locating features are still not that good. Pretty much all the sites I’ve come across that try to geo locate a user based on IP doesn’t even come close to the users actual location. I prefer choosing my own demographic on these sites. Searchforitlocal.com has a nice feature to set your default location and then stores a cookie to always remember you when you return. I think google and yahoo and the bigger sites that are now entering the local search market should stick to their main area of expertise, indexing webpages, and leave this new search feature to the up and comers.