The Local OneBox 10 Pack is new and has yet to be fully vetted. Its appearance off and on over the past week has made testing a bit of a struggle. One of my observations has been, that while Google may be going further afield to provide accurate results, in very rural searches they are not succeeding.

I live in a rural area of Western NY State. One would probably have to travel 70 miles in every direction to find 10 web hosting companies. The search results Web Hosting Olean NY now goes out 50 miles to find 10 results for the web hosting query. The problem? It doesn’t succeed. 50% of the returned results are not in the web hosting business at all but rather are universities.

The Olean Web Hosting search previously returned an authoritative onebox. This seems to imply that Google will be showing it less or that it requires more authority to achieve. That being said the search “Denver Flowers” still returns the Local OneBox for Lehrer’s Flowers. This was the result that was widely looked at just prior to Christmas as an indicator of the growing impact of Google Maps.

Of equal interest to me is that the search for Olean NY Web Hosting when performed inside of Google Maps still provides just 3 results and only uses a radius of 25 miles to find its results.

One assumes that as Google evaluates the click thru’s and other quality indicators the results will either get more accurate or since they have indicated that they are willing to show 3 or 1 perhaps it will just drop back. In the mean time it appears that at least in markets where there are very few competitors the results will be problematic.