GeoSearch at Google

Google is new experimenting with a new “Search by Location” in Google Labs. They are finally catching up with a feature that the old Northern Light had years ago. Google has added a map of locations for the hits from MapQuest. It highlights matching addresses in the keyword in context (KWIC) display, but there is no cache link. At this point, it seems to be limited to U.S. addresses. Searches must include some address information. Full state names and ZIP codes appear to be normalized to a city, state abbreviation search. In other words, the address can be entered in a variety of formats, but the KWIC highlighting usually only highlights the city and state abbreviation in the record, at least on the searches I tried.

This is still very much an experiment. It may not always be available. It may change greatly. Certainly at this point, some of its matches for locations are quite inaccurate.