Tamar Weinberg and Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable report on a possible Google trial (I call it a trial because it can’t be seen in Canada yet) changing the way they display local information within regular web search results. It looks like they’re now showing local results in the middle of the results page in Google.com. Also, they return local results on “state” search (in addition to “city” search).

See screenshot below:

What it means: it looks like early results show increased traffic for those local merchants because of increased visibility. To be followed closely.