Have you ever been in a situation when you have wanted to find a particular place say a restaurant or a theater within an area but have to troll through pages and pages of search results looking for reviews and maps of chosen destinations? Sure, that cannot be termed as an enriching experience. But now, Google is trying to change it with the introduction of Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places.
How will it work?
Let us suppose that you are looking for “Chinese Restaurants Delhi”. Now using the place-search feature, you will see a new search result that is a combination of a traditional Google Search result and a Google Maps search result (showing the pinpointed map), with a link to that location on Google Maps, reviews aggregated from around the Web (from sites like lonelyplanet.com,tripadvisor.com), and a 1- to 5-star rating of that offering. So, Google has clustered search results around specific locations that presents a comprehensive view of each place and thus helps to compare and decide about the destination.
Google will automatically choose the Place search, rather than a general web search, if it thinks your query is about a place. It will also place the new link for “Places” in the left-hand panel of the search results page so that you can switch to these results whenever you want. This new feature will be available in 40 different languages and will be slowly rolled out to users around the world. Until then, you can use this link to get familiarized with the feature. At present Place Search is available for the desktop only, but a mobile version is in development and should be available soon.
My two cents
Okay! I tried the special link to find more about my favorite place. The new layout had more relevant links compared to the normal search result layout but I was more interested in the search format rather than the destination and I must admit that it will take me longer to get used to this new format of search layout. But that can differ from person to person. So I would suggest you to try it out once.
Location-based services such as Foursquare and recently launched Facebook Places have gained importance in the last 12 months. All these services are now trying to tap the locally-served advertising. Google has also been trying hard to encourage the local businesses to come online, a no-brainer as it sees small-business-oriented advertising technology as the next big source of revenue growth. The latest rolled out feature further validates the point. Now it remains to be seen whether this new place search feature establishes rapport with the users or not. What do you think of the new Place-Search feature, do let me know.
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