Google goes local

On Wednesday, the Web search company will unveil Google Local, which has been tested in the company's research and development lab for the last 8 months. Type a keyword along with an address or city name into the search box at Google.com or at its newly designated site, Local.google.com, to find maps, locally relevant Web sites and listings from businesses in the area. "A lot of times when people are looking for something, they want to do it on a local level...This is a core search promise," said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, who helped build the service with a team of engineers from Google's New York office.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is giving prominence to local search at a time when it's one of the most hyped areas of development in the industry. Financial analysts and industry executives say geographically targeted search listings are prime real estate for local advertising, an estimated $12 billion annual business in the United States. In 2004, less than $50 million of that market will go toward ads related to local Net searches, but over time, the dollars will find their way to the virtual world, analysts say.

It will be "worth a lot more online. That is, merchants will pay more," said Safa Rashtchy, Piper Jaffray's Internet analyst. "Integration of that with search will make it very convenient for searchers and extremely useful for local merchants."

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