I am slightly shocked and simply amused that the recent Google Venice Update has largely flown under the radar. The Inside Search Blog published a list of 40 some-odd changes to the algorithm for February, and it seems that Panda 3.3 and the mysterious one liner about link valuation captivated most of the SEO and Inbound world...
The time has come for libraries, too, to negotiate for rights to index full text
By Jonathan Rochkind -- Library Journal, 2/15/2007
The ability to search and receive results in more than one database through a single interface—or metasearch—is something many of our users want. Google Scholar—the search engine of specifically scholarly content—and library metasearch products like Ex Libris's MetaLib, Serials Solution's Central Search, WebFeat, and products based on MuseGlobal used by both academic and public libraries—are all a means of providing this functionality. At the university where I work, without very much local advertising, Google Scholar has become the largest single source of links to our link resolver product, illustrating how hungry users are for metasearch.
There's clear demand from searchers who increasingly expect user reviews as part of their local search experience. Social and local search are on a clear path towards merging.
Welcome to Google Voice Local Search Google Voice Local Search is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone. To try this service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. Using this service
Z. Al Bawab, G. Mills, and J. Crespo. Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, page 397--405. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2012)