Google would like to Access your Location? To Enhance Local Search

Google wants to access your location in order to enhance local search results. The new feature comes via Google Toolbar when you search on Google a notification appears on top of browser asking you if you would like to share your location. The move comes as an attempt to provide more accurate search results depending on user location. You can also share your location with Google’s location based services like Google Maps as well as with third party websites. This feature detects your location from your network address hence keeps your location up to date to show you best possible results. The feature is off by default.

If you are sharing your location with Google or any third party website,  icon appears on your Google toolbar. You can click on it to disable the feature and stop sharing your location. If share my location feature is disabled, it shows  icon on toolbar. You can also enable/disable this feature from Toolbar settings. You can deactivate this feature for a specific website if you’d like.

Share your location feature is also available for Google Maps. Once you decide to share your location with Google Maps, it detects your network location by accessing nearest Wi-Fi spot. This can be really handy as Google may guide you with nearest business locations that may interest you. Another good thing is that your location is not associated with your account but is rather stored in browser memory and keeps changing. Allowed website can retrieve it from browser memory and can present customized offerings to you based on your location.

Here is what toolbar notification looks like:

Websites use W3C Geolocation API to access your location.