Google is doing a lot.. so this post is nothing new but it seems that Google is putting more effort into local search. Some examples I ran into..

Ads for their Business Center..
I haven’t found localized versions of those ads.. but probably they exist already.

New ways of promoting your business
They recently introduced new ad units for local businesses. Those ads appear on both google.com as on the maps.google.com. They are just local listings (as in address info).

Furthermore they’ve put ads on the iPhone Google Map

Aggregating info from other pages and creating their own
And last but not least Google has introduced Places pages. They get information from the web (eg. from Yelp, etc) and put it on their own page. These pages then pop up in the search results.. so they directly compete with the pages the information is aggregated from (Yelp, ..).

So Google is doing some interesting stuff in the area of Local Search that is going to make it harder for the old traditional Yellow Pages companies but also for the new hip and UGC sites like Yelp, Truvo, Qype, TrustedPlaces, YelloYello, ..

PS. Don’t know if ‘warpath’ is actually a word.. but you Dutch people know I mean ‘oorlogspad’