The Google local pack, the map results, you see Google often display in the search results seems to have gone missing. I assume this was a bug, but no one was able to trigger a local pack to show up in Google Search for a 20-minute period.
Examples. Try searching for [barber near me] and you won’t get that local pack. You just get the standard ten blue links, without the map.
This seems to have stopped working at around 11:30 am ET.
And now has returned about 20 minutes later, I now see the local pack:
Why we care. The local pack drives a tremendous amount of traffic to local businesses. It going away, even for a short period of time, can be a huge loss for those local small businesses.
This appears to have been a bug and is now resolved.
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Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.