Google becomes more 'local' with Place Search

Place Search allows a user to find a list of relevant links to restaurants, review sites, blogs and other information in their area. The results are also mapped, with red pins denoting the physical location of the results.

Place Search results appear automatically on Google when the search engine thinks users are looking for local information. The firm has also added a new link for Places in the left-hand panel of the search results page so that users can switch to local results whenever they want.

Jackie Bavaro, the firm’s place search manager, writing on the Google blog, said, "We’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organises the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go.

"With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names."

The launch of Place Search comes as location-based services, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places US, grow in popularity on the internet.