Following the recent rebrand of Google’s Local Business Center to ‘Google Places’ (initially developed to help local businesses gain more visibility in search engine marketing through free listings) the search engine is now adding in over 50 million locations in order to expand their database further.
This means that when you search for something fairly generic such as ‘Indian Restaurant’ it will return local place page listings for you (which will be plentiful for that term as I’m writing this from Brick lane).
This added feature is built into the existing Google search functionality and listings will now pull in groups of relevant links and information such as; reviews, hints and tips, travel and so on. This development dynamically links millions of websites and ‘real-world’ locations, so numbered are the days of ‘+ Shoreditch’, another great step forwards for predictive search.
I wonder how long it will be before Yelp, Google and Foursquare get together…
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