Google Gives 'Near Me Now' Function to Android and iPhone Users
If you have a mobile device running on Android 2.01 or later or an iPhone running on iPhone OS 3.X, you can take advantage of Google’s new search offering “Near me now.” To iPhone and Android users Google provides the ability to use their location as a search query by simply clicking the Near Me Now button. Please note that you must click the button once your location has been provided by your mobile device. Also note that you must enable location for the Near me now button to work.
According to the Mountain View-based search engine giant, Near me now is meant to address a couple of user problems. First of all, Google wanted to make it easy to get info about locations in your immediate vicinity. Let’s say for example that you are strolling around when you suddenly realize that you’re hungry. So you take out your iPhone or Android, hit Near me now and find out that there’s a restaurant just a short distance away.
Not only that, but once you are in front of the restaurant you can also get a lot of additional information about that restaurant by hitting Explore right here. For example you can see what other people that have eaten at that restaurant have to say about it. Pleas note that Explore right here only works if the phone’s location accuracy is of a bout a city block.
There is a second reason why Near me now was developed – to make it simple to search for popular categories of nearby places. On behalf of the Google Mobile Engineering team, John Eric Hoffman and Jussi Myllymaki, explain: “Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don't see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using "Near me now". To search other categories of places not shown, "Browse more categories" provides access to our local search product with more category choices.”
According to the Mountain View-based search engine giant, Near me now is meant to address a couple of user problems. First of all, Google wanted to make it easy to get info about locations in your immediate vicinity. Let’s say for example that you are strolling around when you suddenly realize that you’re hungry. So you take out your iPhone or Android, hit Near me now and find out that there’s a restaurant just a short distance away.
Not only that, but once you are in front of the restaurant you can also get a lot of additional information about that restaurant by hitting Explore right here. For example you can see what other people that have eaten at that restaurant have to say about it. Pleas note that Explore right here only works if the phone’s location accuracy is of a bout a city block.
There is a second reason why Near me now was developed – to make it simple to search for popular categories of nearby places. On behalf of the Google Mobile Engineering team, John Eric Hoffman and Jussi Myllymaki, explain: “Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don't see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using "Near me now". To search other categories of places not shown, "Browse more categories" provides access to our local search product with more category choices.”
