Google’s “Near Me Now” now near you!

Friday, January 8, 2010

Google has launched it’s Yelp competitor “Near Me Now”, a location-based search engine for users to find what’s around them at any moment without needing to speak or enter any search terms. Announced a month ago, Google must have been salivating at the thought of acquiring all of Yelp’s data for Near Me Now. However when that deal fell through a few weeks back the almighty Google presumably did some fancy footwork to get this out as if to say “Oh ya? Well we don’t need your stinking data anyways!”

Unfortunately this service is only being released in the US as of press time. Already there are howls of protests. But for those people in America you are going to be treated to a full featured location-based search capability. You have to let your iPhone send your location to Google, and you also have to be logged in to your Google account. Once that’s in place, “Near Me Now” shows up as a new link on the Google.com mobile home page.

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Then you open to a page like this one:

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The primary option is “Explore right here,” and clicking that brings up a list of local businesses that Google believes is in the same place as you. Of course the critical piece is if Google’s information is correct as far as location is concerned.

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Clicking any one of the listings on that page leads to the business’s mobile Place Page, where you can get whatever information Google knows about that business which is apparently alot. This is exactly the type of information you get from Yelp however Place Pages have their own separate, potentially indexable web pages. This information appears as it’s own search result. Google, the king of search engines, is extending it’s reach from the virtual world of the internet into the real world we inhabit. Let your iPhone do your walking!

Yelp and other location-based services such as Urban Spoon and Where are going to be looking over their shoulder now, as Google lumbers up alongside them and threatens to overtake their market with their incredible brand power, in the US at least. Whether Google can extend their reach beyond the land of the free and home of the brave is anyone’s guess, but I am not going to bet against it!

Thanks to Search Engine Land for the graphics for this article since I am in Canada