Yesterday, Nielson reported the March 2010 U.S. search rankings. It included the normal stuff…Google has a 65.7 market share, Yahoo’s down, Bing is up….

Of more interest to me was the reported fact that there were 6,387,932,000 (6.4 billion) searches on Google in March. Last week, Google noted in their Google Places rebranding of the the LBC that 20% the searches on Google had local intent. Assuming that these results were calculated in roughly similar way, 1.28 billion searches in March on Google had that local intent last month.

We do know that Google doesn’t show the Local Universal Map for all searches with local intent. We don’t have a clue how often Google doesn’t show the map but it seems evident that when there is not enough user in interest in the Map and when Google doesn’t feel like it, it stops showing.

Earlier this year, based on a Google announced factoid that 1 in 13 search result pages showed a Map. I speculated, using conservative values, that the Local Universal results were shown on the order of 800 million times.

So how many times does the Local Universal Map result show on the main Google results page? It is safe to assume that the number is closer to the 1.28 billion than the 800 million.

We don’t know for sure and will probably never know exactly but we are narrowing in on a reasonably good guesstimate and the number appears to be north of a billion. Is it 1.1 billion, 1.2 billion or even 1.28 billion times??

For the sake of symmetry and because no one (other than Google and they aren’t talking) can prove us wrong, let’s round it off, split the difference and say that a Local Universal Map (one box, 3 packs and 7-packs) showed ~1.2 Billion times on the front page of Google.

Regardless, as my father would say, it is no small potatoes.