Google is giving local businesses the facility to access data on how users arrive at a local listing in Google Maps, figuring out what many people in a particular neighborhood are searching for.

Google’s Local Business Center (LBC) allows small businesses to create small web listing that appear next to the users’ queries that pops up in Google Maps with a link to a business’ website and address information. LBC is able to verify their address and phone number, but Google adds search results data to the dashboard within Local Business Center.

For example, Los Angeles bake shop will be able to see the zip codes from which searches originate that wind up at their listing, the keywords that searches are using to find their result, and basic stats about search activity. The idea is to give those businesses a set of metrics from which they can make business decisions about expanding delivery areas, advertising in certain areas, or what people are looking for in a local bake shop. It’s that kind of new visibility Google LBC offers into search patterns that will help business owners.

Take note that this feature is not linked to any of the accounts that businesses might have with Google’s AdWords or AdSense programs.

Local Business Center Dashboard (photo credit: Official Google Blog)

Google local business center is updating? Google Maps Help forums announced that there will be scheduled downtime this Wednesday, July 29th.

Scheduled downtime for Local Business Center
Friday, July 24, 2009 | 1:20 PM

On Wednesday July 29th, there will be some scheduled downtime for the Local Business Center from around 1PM – 2PM EDT/ 10AM-11AM PDT. Thank you in advance for your patience!

Is it safe for us to assume that it is an updated set of features or a new user interface in the Google Local Business Center? We don’t know that just yet but many people are expecting updates from Google in this area and it is due time for an update.

What many people are expecting:
• A way to easily unmerge those bad merged business records
• A way to give multiple people access to local business records
• Improved spam controls and reporting
• Enhanced business hours

Google just not dominate local searches, it also owns mobile search. Google dominated the mobile search market the first four months of 2008. It outnumbered MSN even with the large number of Windows Mobile smartphones in the marketplace.

Smartphones have been around for awhile now than Apple’s, but according to research people are searching the internet more with their iPhones up to 50 times higher than any other handsets. Google is set as a factory default search engine on all iPhones, with Yahoo! being offered as a secondary option. MSN barely reached the next spot.

On the other hand, WM6 owners can install Opera Mini, which offers Yahoo as a default search engine. Opera Mini tends to be quite a popular browser alternative among users of WM6 and BlackBerry devices, which could be part of the reason why Yahoo managed to crawl into second place.

With increasing GPS and location-aware capabilities of today’s mobile phones, Google is able to offer more targeted, local search results to users who are on the go.