Perhaps a little upset over Groupon turning down their $6 billion buyout offer, or perhaps driven from the criticism over not doing enough to push local businesses.
Whatever it is, Google has taken their focus on the “local” to a whole a new level with Google Offers. One thing I’ve found interesting with Offers is that most (if not all) of the deals come from vendors who have a Google Places page.
In an effort to continue expanding this daily deal / local merchant focus, Google has acquired TheDealMap.com, a local deal aggregation site that displays search results on a map.
DealMap is only 15 months old, but grew very quickly in the local deal space when it started integrating deals from sites like Groupon.
It will be interesting to see what Google does with the new map integration.