Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The idea of localising searches for certain terms is a good one. Google had noticed that people tend to search for restaurants and other types of business without specifying a location.
By estimating a user's location from the IP address, Google is able to restrict the search to that broad area. This is more convenient for users, and helps Google stave off local search engines.
In addition to localising the search, Google also returns a map of the results for these types of query. That's definitely a convenience feature, especially when you're travelling. You might not recognise the name of a street or suburb, but it's easy to see how close a 'pin' on a map is to your hotel.
This new feature isn't restricted to terms such as restaurant or bank - searches for business names or street addresses are automatically refined to reflect the user's location.
This all sounds great to me. But even though Google software engineers Jenn Taylor and Jim Muller claim "we've just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don't type in a location," there's no sign of it here, even when I try their sample searches.
While I do get localised sponsored links (which aren't very helpful), there's no sign of local search results, and there's no map.
Maybe it's just that the "worldwide rollout" isn't quite complete yet.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
