Google becomes more local
Currently, if you type "Swindon pizza" into Google, the venerable search engine will give you results that reflect the locality of the search terms, and will give you a local search box that gives details of pizza restaurants in Swindon. Do a search for "curry Swindon" and you will get similar results.This week Google announced that it would be geo-targeting searches when they type service queries that don't specify a location. So, if you type just "pizza" into Google, the search engine will attempt to locate you (homing in on your IP), and show you results that are supposed to be from your area.
My experience of the geo targeting in this instance is similar to other examples of Google geo-targeting elsewhere (such as in Adwords), in that is generally not great. For example searches for non-local services (such as pizza, flowers and curry) carried out on my machine prompted a local result box from "near London", which, if you consider that fact that we are based in Cirencester, near Swindon, is not hugely accurate (at least its in the South, I suppose).
The problem with this type of geo-targeting is that it is based on IP-targeting, which is inherently innacurate. The problem is that when Google attempts to locate users, it homes in on the location of their IP address, which is the unique identifier of their PC. However, IP's can be registered any where in the country, not necessarily in the users vicinity. This makes the practice of IP-targeting often innacurate. You must question why Google is using this method of serving local results. It can only be the lack of suitable alternatives that is leading them down this road.
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