Google is providing an enhanced view of local searches in Google Maps. Now instead of providing just the top 10 local results, if you click on the map you’ll get potentially hundreds of results. The additional results show up as little circles on the map, and you can click them to get more information.
This is a very interesting development in local search. One immediate benefit is discoverability – this could make it much easier to discover a business that doesn’t show up in the 10-pack, but is much closer to you.
Imagine how cool that would be, especially for mobile searches – you could quickly find the closest coffee shop or deli wherever you are, even if they don’t rate in the top-10 results.
It sure seems a little hard to get to this view – it only shows up in Google Maps, so if you are searching from Google.com, you get the normal 10-Pack of local results that we are used to. You have to click on the map to get to this new view.
Also – I haven’t seen any changes when using the Maps search capability on the iPhone yet.
Google mentions in the Official Google Maps blog that they will be adding this view to other domains in the future, so we’ll start to see easier ways to get to this view.
Matt McGee spotted this first last night. Andrew Shotland affectionately named it the K-Pack. And David Mihm shared some excellent observations about it as well on his blog.
This has me thinking about new ways to optimize for local search results for my clients…
What are your thoughts on this development?
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