You’re in a hotel in Philadelphia and have a craving for Chinese food. Using your trusty smartphone, you search for “Philadelphia Chinese food” on Google, and are rewarded with an all-in-one lineup of restaurants, descriptions, review links, and map markers.
On Thursday, the search giant began creating that scenario with a global rollout of Place Search, which it described as “a new kind of local search that organizes the world’s information around places.” In the new results, specific locations are grouped, along with their short descriptions, place and contact information, links to reviews, map links, and other data.
30 Searches Into One
In keeping with its new emphasis on trying to figure out what you really want, the Place Search results appear when the search engine determines that you’re looking for local information. A new link to Place Search in the left-hand panel of search results allows a user to switch to local results whenever desired.
To assemble this array of Philadelphia Chinese restaurants or whatever, Google said it’s dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of web sites with more than 50 million locations in the real world.
It makes inferences about when a site with reviews — such as citysearch.com or tripadvisor.com — is referring to a physical location, even if addresses are not provided and different names are used. As Product Manager Jackie Bavaro noted in a posting on The Official Google Blog, this means the search engine can determine that “stubb’s bbq” is equal to “stubbs bar-b-que,” for instance.
Google said the new layout means it’s easier to find a complete view of each store, retailer or restaurant. More relevant links on a single results page, as many as 30 or 40, mean multiple searches to find the right place can be pared down to one.
‘A Pretty Big Change’
Previously, a search…