Checking out the Shimon Sandler website shows that Sandler found his results in a search for booksellers in New York City. Along with the new adverts there were small coffee cup icons against some of the results. The problem for other people attempting to view these results for themselves is that you need to be within America to pull up the new results.
A quick proxy server later and the results are thrown up exactly as in the screenshots on Sandler's website. Also, after further investigation, we found that the coffee cups (which seem an odd choice for booksellers) are replaced with small beds when viewing search queries in San Francisco. Other search terms in the same cities throw up the new look, but the icons appear to remain the same regardless of the service searched for. For Google at least, New York is a coffee city and San Francisco is a bed city.
It's an interesting tweak, and one that we can expect to see rolled out across the Google Local maps.
For a link to the original article, click through to Shimon Sandler's site here:
http://www.shimonsandler.com / ?p=120
