Why does google rank 1, 2 and 3 on local searches?

[Kurgano]

Try looking up your city name and say "hotels" or "restaurant" or even "doctor" and invariably google returns in the top 3 positions with a map beside the links. Absolutely no town in the US has ANY site returning pages in the top 3.

There is a LOT of search engine traffic from people looking up local resources but the search engines ensure that they harness that traffic for themselves even when several sites lower in the rankings are much more proffesional, many of them not even having ads on them.

My concern is that this trend expands to other search terms over time. The search engines ranking themselves as top 3 for a growing number of search terms doesn't seem right.

Real estate seems a likely candidate to be added upon by google yet there are countless dozens of sites in every city that should receive consideration for top 3.

Thoughts on monopoly like results like this?

[tedster]

This area -- the OneBox for local search -- is not really "ranked" as much as it is inserted above the #1 algorithmic result. Because Google can control the information a lot better than it can rank other pages by algorithm, it gives them a better shot at being useful for their searchers.

Yes, I do expect we'll see features like this expand. If Google puts good, up-to-date information there, I don't personally have a problem with it as an end-user. Of course, as a webmaster with some local search clients I would prefer to see my sites at the top of the search results page -- but I also tend to be a bit greedy about things like that.