With the continued development of the Universal-Search-Integrations, naturally the amount of results from the local search in the Google-SERPs grows, too. Called either “Google Maps“ , “Local Yellowpages“ or something else by Google, depending on how they feel about it at any given time, this integration is a map with 7 results from the searchqueries surroundings (as can be seen to the right). For this posting, I took a closer look at how the user-opinions make their way into Googles local search. To do this, I took the arround 1 million keywords from the SISTRIX Toolbox and checked them for the local search integration: I got 779.466 hits and once I took out all the double entries, I was left with 263.019 unique its. Let's break it down into 5 different classes of how many user-generated-opinions there were:


About three-fourth of all the entries that were found did not have any user opinions associated witht hem, about another 7 percent only had one to five opinions. If we assume that Google will tend to rather show entries that have user-generated-opinions, then the number of entries without user-opinions should be decisively larger when compared to the sum of all addresses. When we look at the breakdown for those keywords that have the most traffic, then it seems that our assumption was correct.


The category with at least 50 user-opinions increased manifold and now nearly takes up 10% of the entries. Another interesting aspect is the source of these user-generated-opinions. The users are not entering them into Google themselves, but Google is scraping this information from the Internet – sometimes with an agreement, sometimes without. Here we have the top-15 sources of user-generated-opinions:


All in all, i was able to find 599 domains from which opinions were being integrated. It seems that, at the moment, Google is not ranking them but is just showing the five most recent ones on the details-page. Toolbox-customers can download the list with all 599 domains here.