Search+mobile=location
A few weeks ago Microsoft blogged about some of the improvements it was preparing for its Bing search engine. Microsoft thinks Bing can take search market share from Google by giving people more information when they search on a key word, and thus help them achieve what their ultimate aim was from searching in the first place.
So we got a new addition to Bing Maps, which combined the foursquare geographically-tagged social networking service to give, in theory, Bing users more useful information when searching for a place.
Google actually released Place Pages - a sort of directory listing within Google Maps that allows you to click on a location and find out more about it - last September, and encouraged people to input their own details through its Local Business Center. Today it has combined the two and renamed them Google Places.
As well as the rebrand, Google has added a few new things, like a personalised dashboard offering data about how many times a listing has been accessed, and the opportunity to pay for a premium ‘tag' which gives a business a more conspicuous presence on a Google map.
Ultimately, Google and Microsoft are positioning themselves for the location-based services market which, like so much else to do with the mobile Internet, is still in its infancy. But as technologies like NFC, mobile commerce and augmented reality gain traction, we could end up performing a large chunk of our commercial interactions via our mobile phones, and maps could be the new search engines.
