There has been lots of talk about Google’s new local carousel in the local search community lately.  Most of this talk centers on strategy and less on how to trigger a carousel search. Internally we have been wrestling with a couple of questions:

1) How broad has the carousel rollout been?

2) Is the carousel the future for local search?

How many verticals has Carousel affected?

There were numerous early answers to this question, particularly this list created via live query research by Adam Dorfman of SIM Partners. Besides the specific queries that cause a local carousel to trigger, Mike Blumenthal did some quick research and determined that in order for a carousel to trigger, the query has to return at least five results.

Anybody who knows me knows I am data driven, so Dave Rodecker and I talked about using our existing crawlers and large database of clients to see if we could figure out some really specific queries that trigger carousel results.

Methodology

One of the quirks of the carousel is that when it triggers, there is no pack result triggered as well. Luckily, thanks to our technology team, our crawlers are able to distinguish between different pieces of a Google SERP so we can see which search queries trigger what types of vertical and universal search features. We compiled a list of queries from recent crawls that triggered carousel results. We verified these were carousel queries by checking to see if a Places result was also triggered, then we spot checked several of them with live searches. Here is a list of queries that we know are currently triggering carousel results:

Obviously, this list is not comprehensive; it is limited to our client list. We do hope to unleash our crawlers with a more robust mission in the future.

Takeaways

This list reveals queries triggering Google’s local carousel spreads across many more verticals than many people, myself included, initially thought. It runs the gamut from professional services (wedding planner) to the more traditional food and beverage industry queries that everyone knows about, to the hyper specific i.e. piano tuner. Seeing the extensive number of queries triggering carousel results leads me to think this may be a live beta that Google is testing for user experience and value before rolling it out to more verticals over time. Are there any other odd queries or verticals that you see triggering carousel results? If so, I would love to hear of them.