One month ago Google unveiled five big new technologies in one day – and then launched real-time search that afternoon. One of those five was something called Near Me Now, and it just went live moments ago.
The feature lets Google grab your geographic location and display restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATM machines and more in your immediate vicinity. It’s available today for both iPhone and Android users. It’s enough to make a person bookmark Google.com, instead of just Googling through the browser search bar.
This feature is much more useful than Google Latitude and it’s more lightweight than launching Google Maps. It probably doesn’t bode well for established local mobile search apps like Yelp or for innovative new ones like NextStop. Those are a lot of fun, but Google’s Near Me Now is good enough, it’s fast enough and gosh darn it, I think people are going to like it.
If you like this: Read What Twitter’s New Geolocation Makes Possible.
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