Fresh from Google’s test labs comes the as-yet-unannounced “LCB“, which some are calling “searchless search”.  Actually, it’s still search, it’s just a mobile way of accessing categorised business listings based on location: enter your address and choose from seven predefined sections – Food/Restaurant, Travel, Transportation, Retail, Entertainment, Sports and, oddly, Googleplex – which all have local attractions.

Spotted when someone was browsing through Google’s robots.txt file – the document that tells search crawlers which files of a site to ignore –  the new interface links with Google Maps to show directions.  It would obviously be more useful with GPS functionality, so that you needn’t tell LCB where you are (unless you wanted to look up, say, restaurants near where you were visiting).

The Googleplex category, incidentally, seems to give results in Manhattan no matter where you say you are; current thinking is that it’s a placeholder of sorts for an as-yet unformalised section.

[via BGR]