I referred a recent post on Matt Cutt’s Blog about a very simple and interesting tool for webmasters and local businesses. It says “If someone searches for your business and Google knows your business address, Google will include an expandable Plus Box in your search result listing. If a user clicks to expand the Plus Box, they will see a Google Map! to help reach you.” Something similar to their “Connect for free” Adwords sponsored listings with a telephone icon!

Real Innovation! Google keeps the user interface very clean and the page uncluttered, as opposed to some other portals and sites that tend to throw everything they’ve got at the user. Google is really great about maintaining a strong focus on what has made them successful. They don’t let the features interfere with the user experience. The fact that Google is so direct and so fast supports people’s flow, and that’s why they have a strong emotional connection to it.

When you get into adding new features, at the end of the day, there are tradeoffs that have to be made, and users go to Google because they’re fast, direct, and support people’s flow. Google supports use of Flash and Ajax making the web experiences much more rich and interactive, and when people are developing websites sometimes the technology can interfere with the user’s experience and flow.

Google’s is also expanding in a more geographical sense, opening offices around the world and studying how cultural differences impact site design. For example, in China, typing is really hard to do, so they’re much more browser- oriented than they are search-oriented. So they’re looking at behavioral patterns that can affect user experience. So in China, when you enter a query into the search box, as you type Google predict what the possible terms are, and pop up a list of possible queries. So instead of having to type a full query you can pick it from a list.