Yep! Gone for me too – tried both PC and Mac…

I caught this yesterday myself and was discussing it internally prior to the article. Nonetheless, last week I saw Google further hyper localize search by setting the search to an even smaller result. I.E. I live in Tampa, however a smaller less populated sub-city is Temple Terrace. The office in which I work is within the small city limits of Temple Terrace (literally on the border), however my search used to be lumped into Tampa as a whole. Last week I noticed that it had further been refined after almost a year or more to now show Temple Terrace as my physical search location instead of Tampa. This was last week and now the ability to set a physical location is removed. *Thanks Chris for the hack. Is there a Firefox version or one for Safari you’ve discovered?

I was going to mention Ad Preview too.

But there is a super easy hack Darren Shaw posted at the Local Search Pros G+ Community last night.

I misunderstood and thought he was changing query to add near city. But he’s appending that to the URL string. Here is what Darren said:

“I’m talking about just searching “dentist” and then MODIFYING THE URL to add this parameter to it: &near=CITYNAME. For example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dentist
modified:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dentist&near=chicago

By adding the near parameter, you are doing the same thing as the old function to set the location.”



Aw cr@p. I hope this doesn’t stick. But the fact that they had been testing this recently, as Mike mentioned above, and I had seen recently (possibly 4 or so separate dates in my experience) suggests this will be permanent.

Aw cr@p. Most reference a monopoly by market share, but another element of monopoly is control of information. Google controls A.L.L the information. Websites get less and less and most of the control on that is enforced by Google.

I’ll try Darren’s work around and others. For our information, our smb’s, and our analyses and efforts this type of information has been very valuable. Now google has it, and we don’t. That is a function of monopoly.

BTW: @Mike and @Mike Blumenthal above; if one wanted to set location parameters independent of your location; setting the (formerly available) location paramters for United States did in fact work. I used it on many occasions and it provided interesting insights vis a vis, how location strength impacts or effects proximity versus website or “domain strength” for local organic rankings.

That insight is also now lost unless the workaround by Darren and other workarounds can give you search results based on your preference and not what google wants you to have.

As David Mihm once said: “Its google’s world”

Thanks for the workarounds. I have been moaning about this to myself for a couple of weeks now. Especially as it was gone and then came back and then disappeared again.

Currently Bing still allows for changing search settings. For one of our regional smb’s we set location for a suburban town to a major city and saw both pack and organic results with one set of results. Changed the geo setting to the nearby city and we saw different results in Bing. (bings reliance on location is similar to that of google both in organic and in the PACK)

From a business perspective this change by google gives us less understanding of the marketplace. They have the information and we don’t have it. Its a deeply manipulative change as it effects smb’s. Google has more impact on smb’s than virtually any other entity and they are uncontrolled and not accountable.

Well, Alphabet dropped the “Do No Evil” motto. I suppose they can do whatever they wish

@Mike
In rural Texas, refining the automatic location setting means moving to a point 30 miles away instead of 60 miles.
@Darren & @Linda, thanks for the workaround!

@Chris Desrochers thanks 🙂 any chance a Mac version may come along?

@Mike

I suppose you’ve chosen US? There’s a lot of cities in US, that’s why it freezes while loading the select box. Tweaked to show only US States, can you try again?

If it doesn’t work, you can try the url below for Alabama:

https://www.google.com/search?q=ice-cream&num=10&hl=en&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIVQWxhYmFtYSxVbml0ZWQgU3RhdGVz&ei=u0xfVqPlH8mAywOOhJKQCg&gws_rd=cr

Luis

Hi,

You can generate the uule parameter with php, see https://github.com/512banque/uule-grabber/blob/master/uule.php
Not my code but should work. For more info see https://moz.com/ugc/geolocation-the-ultimate-tip-to-emulate-local-search

I based my code on this article. Let me know if you need any help.
Regards,

Luis

@Mike: State level searches are pretty frequently used in physically smaller states; assume all of New England, NJ, Delaware, Md. One might assume South Carolina, though I have no experience there. Clearly in all those states, especially Massachusetts, you’ll see search terms with Boston and then other cities or towns. In NJ you could find more with Northern NJ, Southern NJ and some other descriptors.

But they are definitely used a good bit. Search terms might include initials more than the full name of the state. They are used in other states, but at a far far lesser percentage of the totals, with city names dominating.

Now as to the workarounds. I’ve been trying a few of them. Some successes some failures. One result in which I have confidence is using the adwords location tool.

We use the location tool quite a bit. We use it for sort of niche smb types in which there aren’t a lot of competition and their visibility in the pack and in organic are more regional than singular to a one community with a lot of competitors.

We scan through a region, check to see visibility and ranking and then create organic pages wherein we can get more visibility in different cities.

The adwords tool shows tremendous granularity. I used it for pizza. We don’t have any pizza smb’s and don’t run ads. The results were pulled up and showed different pizza places highlighted in the pack and in organic as I went from town to town. We also got a message at the top telling us that our ads weren’t showing. 😀

Ha ha. I’ve always used adwords for information as much as getting clicks. Its really a great granular tool.

Mike! Long time friend. Thank you for the applet direction, lifesaver.