Regardless of how useful some of the local search results displayed with the local maps, it becomes terribly annoying and detracts from the user experience. There is an easy way to remove the map all together from Google search. Simply set and save your location as “Alaska”, then the Google local search results will never bother you again.
No more extra scrolling to get to results # 4 and below.
Thanks for the tip. I tried this on Bing also and managed to do away with the annoying maps on the search results.
Alaska results were polluted by the Google Maps again. So instead, you should set the smallest countries as your location.
Vatican City (0.2 square miles) or Monaco (0.7 square miles) works well as they are not likely to have any businesses that you are actively searching for unless you are Googling for the “Pope” and “Casinos” respectively.
Seems Yahoo is diluting their natural search results with a maps implementation also. It doesn’t work very well either where it show me a different state altogether, and can’t be disabled.
On a typical computer screen, you would be lucky if you can get more than 3 results from natural search. If you want to play on Yahoo, you have to pay.
http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/google-local-suggest-mostly-useless/ – Michael Gray concurs.