I’ve been looking at the difference between searching for a local company on the regular Google web search and on the Google Maps search to see if there is any kind of correlation between the two. For this test I decided to search on “Vasi’s Catering Haiku, HI“. Entering that as my first search, I was given a result page that had a local result at the top of the page (which points to their own website), and a nice list of iyp results, starting at city search, going through paradise pages, down into local.yahoo, before actually listing their website in the regular results.

Clicking on the ‘More information‘ link under the local result gives a different result set as the query has changed, it now includes a zip code, radius parameter, and lat and long parameters. The first result is their own website (to be expected since that was shown as the primary local result on the previous page), then it’s a New York cafe website, that lists nothing to do with Hawaii on the site, followed by the previously seen paradise pages result and new allpages and yellowbook listings.

Interestingly enough, clicking back on the ‘web’ results then displays a different set of results, as the new parameters added in in the last step are now passed back through to this search, which returns pretty much the same results as the first time, bar the paradise pages result which was showing in both of the other searches.

Staying in Hawaii (who wouldn’t?), the next search that I did was for “kihei plumbing kahului hi“. This gave me a local search result for Paradise Pages that was also the primary organic result. Following that came Switchboard, BuildingTradesDir, Superpages and CitySearch. Again, clicking the ‘more information‘ button changes the results. Paradise Pages retains pole position, but then Allpages and Kivanetext are the only other results associated with this search.

So what does this show? Basically that there’s not much of a relation between the regular organic web search and the local search on Google. Yes it’s a small sample shown here, but you can do the same searches with most businesses and you’ll see similar results. It’s also not as if the local results are somehow tied to the business in some special way, as in the first example there was a website with no relation to the business, and in the second example there was a listing to a competing plumber on Paradise Pages, as well as to the actual plumber.