So, it looks like Google’s finally taken their local search tool and combined it with their mapping tools and released them from their “Beta” label. Maps.Google.com is no more. Actually, it just points to Google Local, which is still at Local.Google.com … the most interesting thing to the press, of course, will be that Google’s actually taken the “Beta” tag off of it.
Now, don’t go getting all crazy … the Froogle and News searches are still in beta (even though they’re linked on every Google search page), so it’s not like Google’s just releasing everything.
The bottom line here is that Google’s finally revealed that they weren’t crazy: the whole mapping thing is all about getting you to use their search engine to look for restaurants and other businesses —that Google can now hit up for advertising placements.
Actually, the most interesting thing to me about those pages is that there are no obvious ads. I mean, they are pulling reviews of restaurants from Dine.com and ChefMoz and RestaurantRow and Yahoo and wcities and even AOL’s CityGuide … which makes me wonder if they’re doing that throguh partnerships or by just scraping the web. Do they have permission to republish reviews? They’re using Yellow Pages listings from Verizon’s Superpages and business locations from ShopLocal and CitySearch... it’s hard to tell exactly how they’re making money here (unless all of these search partners are actually paying Google, which I doubt). When did Google become an aggregator anyway? How many of these sources do they have?
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