Google Search By Location

Google Labs has created a beta "Search by Location" function to their popular search engine. It has only two query boxes: one for keywords and one to provide an address, city and state, or zipcode. Searches return a MapQuest map of the location where you're searching with results located on the map.

http://labs.google.com/location/

As you might expect, the results are a tad unpredictable. Searching "morris dancing" and "Syracuse, NY" yielded 132 hits "within 15 miles", most of which were for local dance clubs and community cultural websites. The organization was a bit scattered and you had to open each website in turn to see what the relavancy was. Still, not bad.

Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz news website reports: "A couple of times I tried searching for cities that Google apparently couldn't parse (Winston-Salem NC) and sometimes more common keywords led to less focused results (try searching for "books" in Los Angeles CA). But overall this is quite good, especially as a new app right out of the box."

At least one person on the Google Labs newsgroup questioned the efficacy of this system over Yahoo Yellow Pages, but I think he was missing the point. Yahoo's YP are hierarchical, categorized, and therefore, limited in scope, whereas Google's "Search by Location", provided it can find the necessary geographic hooks, has the whole of the web at its disposal and can find non-business (organizations without official addresses, for instance) that YP would miss.

Google, by exploring alternatives to straight-up search engines -- offering intriguing interface designs such as Google Viewer and Google Catalogs -- pushes the envelope on how people retrieve information on the web. Google Search by Location is no exception.

I'll be keeping my eye on this one. It will be interesting to see if websites begin putting geospacial coordinates (or at least zipcodes) in their metadata.

Posted by Tom on September 23, 2003