"Ever wish you could see more than just ten local search results at once? Us too. So we've added a search layer for local search results that activates when there are more relevant results than we can show on one page. Instead of just plotting the first page of business results on our map, we plot more of them as small circles. You can click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top ten results will still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map," mentions Google Lat-Long Blog.
In other news, Google Maps is for the first time more popular in the US than MapQuest. According to comScore, Google Maps had 42.3 million unique US visitors in January, while AOL's MapQuest had only 41.5 million uniques.
"Google has for several years been investing very heavily in Maps (and Earth), as well as distributing Google Maps across the internet via its API. The features and capabilities developed for Google Maps are more extensive and widely known than those of its competitors. (...) Google steadily built out a large number of features that consumers and the market have found compelling. More importantly, Google has regarded Maps as a strategic product, arguably its most successful after core search," suggests Greg Sterling.
Ironically, when Google Local was launched in 2004, Google used MapQuest as a provider for maps.
