April 21, 2010-- Every day, Google connects millions of people with businesses in their local communities. We help people find these businesses when they search Google and discover  Place Pages, and we help business owners manage their Place Pages on Google through a tool we call the Local Business Center.

Today, we’re renaming the Local Business Center to Google Places and adding a number of new features. In addition to these new features, Google Places will continue to offer the same tools as the Local Business Center, such as helping a company  verify and supplement business information including hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons and product information;  providing a way to communicate with customers; and giving businesses  new insights that enable it to make smart decisions.

The new Google Places name simplifies the connection with Place Pages and reflects our ongoing commitment to providing business owners with powerful yet easy-to-use tools to help people discover them when they search.

“Getting customers through Google makes my job great. It’s incredibly valuable to have all those listings grouped together in one place,” according to Chris Gallagher, owner of  Bean & Leaf in New London, Connecticut. “It shows you how important Google Places is because we want to truly reflect the attention we pay to our business to our customers.”

Today we’re introducing several new features to Google Places:

• Service areas: If you travel to serve customers - a photographer, plumber, or piano tuner, for example - you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private. This helps the millions of home-based and service businesses be found by customers in their service areas.
• A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with  Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we’ll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, and San Francisco.
• Business photo shoots: In addition to uploading your own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we’ll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We’ve been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have  created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.
• Customized QR codes: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a  QR code that’s unique to their business. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.
• Favorite Places: We’re doing a second round of our  Favorite Places program, and are mailing  window decals to 50,000 additional businesses around the US. These decals include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.

Over the past few months we’ve also added the ability for business owners to post  real-time updates to their Place Page. They can promote sales, special events, or anything else customers need to know right now, and this feature lets businesses communicate that directly to their customers. They can also provide extra incentive by adding coupons, including ones  formatted for mobile phones.

To keep track of how a business listing is performing on Google, we offer a  personalized dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found your business on Google, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people traveled from to visit their business. With the dashboard, a business can see how the use of any of these new features affects interest in the business and can make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google or how to interact with your customers.

One out of five searches on Google are related to a user’s location, and very often people are looking for local businesses. Google Places is just the beginning of what’s to come from our efforts to make Google more local. To learn more, you can visit our blog post on Google Places or see our newly updated  Help Center. We’ll also be posting on the  Lat Long blog throughout the week to give a deeper dive into many of our newest features. To get started now, go to  google.com/places.