Bad news for geographic domain holders?
 

Location-specific domain names can fetch good money in the domain market. Developed location-specific domain names are great places for deep vertical ads for subcategories within a particular location or make for possibly lucrative ad-driven directory sites. Now, Google might undercut the location domain players with the announcement below: Google Place Pages for Maps. Much of it powered by spidered content (here's a sample:http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ft...803e&q =tokyo And there's even map pages for specific businesses with aggregated reviews http://maps.google.com/places/us/san...tartine-bakery )

Full announcement here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/...there-are.html

Google Maps is a great tool for exploring places ? you can pan around the map, zoom in and see nearby places, look around in Street View and search for whatever you want. But what I always wanted to do is be able to get a clear understanding of what a place is all about. Instead of doing the research all over the web, wouldn?t it be great to see all the information about one place in...one place?

Starting today, you can do that on Place Pages for Google Maps. A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place ? there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.