The local search marketplace continues to grow rapidly, at a faster pace than general search. Local Search – more than 1.5 billion queries per month, second most popular activity after email – is at the cross road of several trends in hyper growth mode.

1. A larger portion of local SMB offline spending is shifting online.
2. Local search still represents less than 10% of search advertising and could double over the next 5 years with spending projected to grow from $8 billion in ‘07 to nearly $20 billion in ’11.
3. Lead generation spending is expected to reach $3.6 billion in ‘11

Web search queries have also continuously grown in length and precision, increasingly including geo-modifiers, driving more conversions.

To this point, Greg Sterling’s “Consumer Purchase Funnel” describes pretty well the consumer purchasing cycle from general research in Web search to transactional intent at a local search level.

And bloggers have definitely picked up the trend, with about 27 posts a day trending upward.