Google Local and Google Maps have been around in beta for a while, but only for US businesses and maps. No longer. Google has just rolled out Google Local and Google Maps for the UK.

With Google Local you can search for businesses in or near a specific town or postcode. It starts by recognising you’re in the UK from your machine’s internet address. Search keywords can either be part of the business name or other keywords. Results seem to be ranked on a combination of keyword relevance (with words in the name of the business weighted higher than those in the description) and distance. So lawyers sw14 puts infolaw top. Google also suggests related categories to search: in the above example, Solicitors and Legal Services.

Google’s mapping is not as detailed or as accurate as, say, Multimap, and the directory not as structured as, say, UpMyStreet, but the familiarity of the interface and the integration with other Google features provide compelling reasons to use it.