Other bloggers around the world have noticed the same thing, including Amit Agarwal in India and David Shaw in the UK. The ads are local business ads, but seem to be triggered by the search terms.

What’s disappointing about these ads is that instead of taking you to a pushpin on the map itself showing you the location of the business doing the advertising, it takes you to the Website of that business like a normal search ad. But this is more about Google turning on a gusher of ad inventory that it was ignoring before than about creating an elegant map-based advertising experience. According to comScore, 131 million unique visitors worldwide checked out Google Maps in August. They generated 1.3 billion pageviews. That’s a lot of untapped ad inventory.

Tags: adwords, business ads, google, google maps, pay per click, text ads