Search with My Location

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: So, there’s a really nice feature that’s built into your browser if you’re using the iPhone with 0S3.0. Now you can automatically, if you choose to opt in, send Google your location and that will make the searches a lot more relevant. So, if you’re looking for restaurants or pizza or coffee or gas or movies or whatever, we’ll find the stuffs that’s closest to you. It’s really easy to turn on. You have to opt in so that you’d choose to give us the information about where you’re located but it’s really simple to do. Let’s walk through it. All you have to do is click through and you can sort of see here there’s a preferences tab. Now, by default, we won’t allow the use of your device location. So you click “yes” and then click “save” and as you can tell, we don’t know where you are located at first. So you have to click update and then we know where you are. So for example, if you want to search for restaurants, you can type R-E-S-T and then I have it in my history so I click right there. You can see the number one result is restaurant.com but after that, I get great local results. Uncle Frank’s Barbecue, Hobie’s Restaurant and Fiesta Delmar. Uncle Frank’s Barbecue, by the way, has very good stuff so I highly recommend it. All of these are pretty good restaurants. If you get the location wrong or you want to change it, you can always just click here and say, “Okay, enter a new location.” But it’s awfully handy, just the fact that it automatically detects it. I’m in the mood for some barbecue so I’ll just click some directions and off I go.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: