After reading the official Google blog today I can say that it has been confirmed (at least by my free interpretation ),
Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:
1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results.
Other news: latest hitwise reports show an increase of Google Maps usage, it’s now little over 2 percent of all Google properties. 2 % might seem little, but it’s a whole lot of people.
Good post,local search does matter!