I was struck by the obvious similarity between the visual aspects of the new Local OneBox and the Google test of the Sources display first spotted by Cyrus Shepard.
Google has been on a tear of late in local to gather photos and display them on your Place page. One assumes that this effort is on going in other topical areas as well.
Google is currently showing similar results to the Sources test for bricks and mortar businesses and geographical points of interest. What better way to demonstrate that universal results are nothing but search results rather than “other Google products”? Products, online retailers, celebrities, movies, TV shows etc all would lend themselves to the first page search result treatment.
I think the real purpose of this is to destroy Wikipedia.
Comment by Al (2 comments) — November 9, 2011 @ 2:05 pm