Is Bing Better for Local Search than Google?

By John Joyce on January 11, 2010 - Comments 0

I was reviewing analytic data for my website last night and was surprised to see that a visitor had arrived at my site by searching on “internet marketing consultant” from Bing.  The search term is obviously relevant to my business but it’s a fairly broad and competitive search term for which I don’t show up on the first page in general search engines.  When I followed the search link and scrolled to the bottom of the page, I noticed the local search result:

Bing automatically served this result based on the geographic location of the searcher.  This is really very intuitive since local search has become a large percentage of total activity on the big three search engines.

I would have to visit http://maps.google.com to get a similar result from Google and if I were to start at the main Google search bar, http://www.google.com, I would have to use the “long tail” search phrase, online marketing business near shirley, ma, to finally get the following result:

It’s very frustrating that Google Maps and Google Search are two separate entities and there isn’t a way to configure the presentation of results.  Using Bing, I can choose “all results” or “local results” from the left menu pane.  At the very least, Google needs to add “Local” to the list of options like video, news, etc.