Google Mobile search without typing.

Googling Google featured an article about Google having some mobile action up their sleeves as they added the link http://www.google.com/m/lcb to be disallowed in their robot.txt . As it is most likely still in testing or development stage, perhaps that's the main reason why Google is hiding such a great idea from the public eye till the official launch.

Code named "LCB" , it is supposedly a Google Mobile Service allowing users to search for businesses by categories like Food or Restaurants , Travel, Transportation, Retail, Entertainment, Sports and Googleplex just by entering the location you are at in the US. I'm not sure what googleplex might be but I'm predicting either some complex or building owned by Google or probably a future Google service mobile kiosk that is placed around town that enables users to portabily use the facilities or services provided by Google at these kiosk terminals . As clarified by Dr.Payam , Googleplex is Google's HQ. The other categories are rather straight forward with the simple Google-ish layout and should be an easy to use service based on the pictures leaked below.

Image Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=978

Phones being such an important gadget in everyday life will be another good platform for advertising. Google knowing the importance of this would most likely have studied the benefits of having a location based information retrieval system on mobile platform and how it could help them grow beyond just web services. Having all the information of businesses based on the location of the users at their hands is beneficial to both users and business owners.

It is a win win situation as Google will earn revenue's from the advertisements of the businesses and the owners will get the right exposure and target audience required. This service will benefit users as they are able to utilise the service to find locations of businesses around them and perhaps even reduce the time needed by the user to make up their minds on choosing which business or service suits their needs.

The only issue I can think of currently is about the users privacy. Perhaps as long as the users are the ones who input their own locations and not tracked by telco networks or Google, privacy will not be an issue. Overall, if this system is implemented properly and successfully in the US, it'll be a great to see Google extending this service to this part of the region . We would only know how effective the system will be once it is launched but I would say this is definitely a service to be watched out for.