The following was written by Andrew Goodman.

In doing a quick search for the San Jose Hilton, I noticed there was a fair bit of info available through Google Local, like how many rooms, whether pets are accepted, parking situation, etc. It's not clear, though, that the hotel has gone into Google Local Business Center to enter this info.

It looks like Google has pulled info from Superpages and MobilTravelGuide.com. Obviously, doing this is easier when there are existing info sources, as is the case in the travel industry.

So the "file" on this hotel through Google Local is getting more extensive, including rates, basic hotel information, and a cross-section of reviews (Google continues to pursue the path of "meta-reviews," pointing users to reviews from other sites like Yahoo and wcities.) That's exactly what users are going to want.

But many other types of businesses will need to be more proactive, since Google wouldn't know where to pull info from, if any is indeed available.

The big gap right now is simply in businesses taking advantage of the opportunity and posting their information. Without it, results are messy and hard to find, even for major businesses. (For example, within 80 miles of Toronto, there are about ten La-Z-Boy furniture galleries. The parent site does a good job of giving you product info, and you can look up physical addresses of dealers. But to find out anything about the hours of operation of the local outlets, you need to call. Argh.)

This is one of those "get ahead of your competitors" opportunities that small businesses should take advantage of now. In two years, everyone will have done it, and the playing field will be more level.

It still looks to me as if there will be two kinds of local listings players here: those who act as feeders of raw information to the portals, and the portals themselves, who will get the lion's share of the visits from users who will not tolerate hunting around various directories to get the info they need. Google and Yahoo are still positioned as premier info aggregators, and as such, they profit disproportionately from information they don't directly gather or own (though they can also gather and own content in their own right).

Reader Comments...

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IntentionalFoul.com

Google recently launched www.google.co.za which we were very happy about. Reason being that we here in South Africa (in my personal opinion) we just do not have good enough search engines.

At first I noticed that results were the same when searching www.google.com and www.google.co.za. But this changed recently and now some nice South African sites are showing up for specific searches using www.google.co.za

It is great news for my local clients and my own sites. South African SEO's will have to keep up to the international search engine standards now. I hope the competition awakens the local search engines so that they up their standards too. Aardvark uses Google anyway. iEntry launched www.searchza.com which might blow some life into the local search arena as well. MSN also made the distiction...

The only thing I wonder about is whether the majority of South African users know of the changes????

Traditionally everybody just use Yahoo.com or google.com to search as our local engines do not provide much of a choice.....

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may be useful:

http://www.google.com/lochp

Search term: pizza

Google: Find pizza near:

My answer: Moss

12 hits in a Norwegian town of 27 000 inhabitants.

GoogleBot sees you.

Combined with intellifit's http://www.intellifit.com/sitenew/home/index.html search for fit (explanation in lower right corner) it opens new exiting possibilities.

Search term: Suit

Bot's question: Intellifit ID

My Answer: IF-123456789

Bot's question: Location

My answer: Moss

Bot's comment: Based on your ID I propose the following brands and colour. Do you have another wish? Y/N

My answer: N

Bots's Question: Do you want to order online no? Y/N

My answer: N

Boots final answer: If you want to go to a local store, I find these stores. If you want to go to a regional store, these:

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
Albert Einstein


Kjell Gunnar Bleivik
http://www.multifinanceit.com/
http://www.blognorway.com/

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