Google Maps was the only specialized search engine from Google's sidebar that didn't have a consistent interface for search results. When you clicked on "Maps" in the sidebar, you were sent to Google Maps, a service that has a completely different interface.
Google experiments with adding a "Places" option to the menu. The main difference is that local search results are displayed inside the regular Google search interface and users no longer have to visit Google Maps
thats really a useful post.
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