Though I think that there are times when that might be trumped, like in Miriam’s example of the Pizza family.

I suspect that Google might be prioritizing people’s phone numbers over onebox results, purposefully.

You’re welcome, Miriam. Anita’s been coming out with some great stuff for a few years, but this was the first time we had ever really had worked together in some way, which was nice.

I thought I’d mention, I tried your ‘pizza search’ for the largest town in my county, and rather than getting the type of results for this that you did for Newark, I got three phone numbers for people whose last name was Pizza! How whacky! John and Lynne Pizza may be getting some unwanted phone calls…

Why would Google not have pizza shops in my area for this new local search function? Haven’t gotten around to finding them yet? What do you think? I’d be interested to know.

Mirian

She noted its usage, fluctuation of usage, and that Google keeps it when there is significant visitor clickthroughs on the onebox and eliminates when it doesn’t draw visitor action.

Clearly Google monitors, evaluates and has a better read on visitor usage of all aspects of its pages than any of us and it clearly has a tight read on onebox effectiveness.

Over the long term I’d bet they’ll monetise this.

In the meantime It’s a potential seachange for local entities.

Since they are in the new format, people may be clicking on them based upon their novelty. But since there’s not a lot of distinction between them and organic results (same width and not much of a gap between them and the organic results), I think they may continue to draw traffic.

They may have an impact upon your longtail terms. I agree with you on the importance of folks taking a close look at their traffic stats.

I rigorously check my biz long tail searches with local phrases and I can see where this is going to be detrimental to me immediately. A short while ago my biz google local listings went south. I haven’t had time to check it and wasn’t too concerned…but now it will have dramatic impact. My guess is it will negatively impact 1/3 of my best leads based on this latest series of changes.

If people focused on local business sites are following this I’d look at this real hard.

This site and mike blumenthal’s blog at blumenthals.com/blog are great resources for looking at what is going on with regard to G maps.

I’d check it immediately.

Dave

I’ve seen some grumbling about it in some places on the web, but I think that it is a good move forward.

Dave