Google rebranded its Home Services platform into Local Services and officially launched it in 17 cities throughout the United States, the Alphabet-owned company announced on Tuesday. The solution presently appears to be most intensively concentrated in California where it’s available in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. Google’s support pages detailing the service also mention Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and Phoenix as cities where consumers and businesses can already take advantage of the platform. New York City, Dallas, and Seattle are supported as well, as are Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
The Mountain View, California-based tech giant is planning to expand Home Services to 13 more major metro areas by the end of the year, the company said yesterday, without elaborating on the matter. The platform will presumably continue rolling out to more cities throughout 2018 but there’s currently no indication of it being launched outside of Google’s home country. All of the aforementioned areas have listings spanning service providers like electricians, plumbers, garage door companies, locksmiths, and HVAC firms, with Google saying that certain cities may also offer additional services like house cleaning. The platform itself is essentially Google’s online take on yellow pages, being designed to provide consumers with a highly localized list of service providers, especially those that are on call in their time of need. The internet giant has been developing the solution for several years now and presently offers a platform that isn’t based on bidding auctions like its main advertising framework. Instead, businesses pay for leads and influence the prominence of their listings in that manner, in addition to being able to define weekly advertising budgets in advance.
Consumers looking to tap into Google’s knowledge base of local service providers can do so by following the Play Store banner below and downloading the Home Services app. Businesses seeking to start advertising on the platform should refer to the source link beneath the banner for more info on the platform and resources that can help them get started. The Home Services app is compatible with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and later versions of the operating system.