Google rolled out a new feature called "Place Search" on Wednesday to make it easier for users to find information about local businesses.
Place Search is a new kind of local search result that organizes the
world?s information around places. Google has clustered search results
around specific locations so users can more easily make comparisons and
decide where to go.
Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when
Google predicts a users is looking for local information. In addition,
users will find a new link for "Places" in the left-hand panel of the
search results page so they can switch to these results whenever they
want.
With Place Search, Google is dynamically connecting hundreds of millions
of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. Google
automatically identifies when sites are talking about physical places and
cluster links even when they don?t provide addresses and use different
names.
Place Search is rolling out now and will be available globally in more
than 40 languages in the next few days.
On Monday, Google announced a program called Google Boost which makes it
easier for local businesses to place advertisments alongside search
results for local information.