Google to Add Geolocation Information to Search Results

Geolocation is quickly moving from a hyped up concept to reality as various services are beginning to add location features. Twitter has just rolled out support in its API very recently and now Google is implementing a new method of providing location information inside the search results. The search engine announced that it would begin to add a location indicator in some specific circumstances for sites with top level domain names like .com or .net.

“Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results,” Piyush Prahladka, a software engineer at Google, wrote.

The feature will only show up for a few searches, where it would really make a difference. Google exemplifies with a search for “capital city boxing” which yields several results for several underrated boxing clubs in different regions. With the regular search there's no way to know which is which as they all have a .com domain name. Normally users would either have to refine their search by adding the region they're interested in, Canada in this case, or by going through all the results to find the one they need. But with the new location feature 'Canada' is displayed next to the URL in the search results saving the users from a lot of time wasting.

Most of the time though, users won't get any notification, it only shows up if the location provided by the webmasters for the site is different to the location of the users and, again, only for non-country code top level domains. Webmasters also have some degree of control over the feature and they can use the Webmaster Tools service Google provides to select a country/region for their sites. Google will roll out the feature in a limited test, roughly 1 percent of the users will see it, but it should see a wider release not too far into the future.