“Starting today, English-speaking iPad users in the U.S. will see a new, interactive experience when they search for restaurants, bars or other local places on Google. In addition to the regular web results, a horizontal “carousel” of local results will appear at the top of the page.

For example, say you’re located in New York City and you search for [ramen shops]. On the carousel, you can quickly and easily see a place’s overall review-based score, address and a picture related to the location. A quick swipe displays additional results. If you find a place you’re interested in, simply click on its image to get a card that can be expanded to show more detailed information, reviews, and more,” says Google.

That expandable “card” includes Zagat ratings and more. It also features the familiar map which can be expanded if needed.

The new feature hitting the Places API today is support for events. If you use Facebook at all, you understand the basic premise behind the event. It allows users to designate a place and time to whatever is happening in their life or in the life of others. It’s also great for businesses to advertise an upcoming concert or show at their venue.

Previously, events on the Places API had to be set to separate entries even if they were at the same place. That’s why you would have the local bar and music joint being listed once as a business and then listed five other times as the venue for a concert. A big feature of the Places API is that you’re able to search for venues, but having that many events clogging up the Places API broke the search function over time.

The new event support in the Places API will fix that problem. There is now an explicit option for adding events, and it’s a bit more targeted this time around. Users can now attach events to a specific place with a specific lifetime. Once the event has occurred, it will no longer show up in search results. It will remain in the background, only accessible by a unique ID, to help preserve a user’s location history.

On top of events, the Google Places API has received updates like auto-complete and a more refined search. All these updates seem poised to put Google Places on track to complement the likes of Yelp! and Foursquare in location-based business promotion.

For those who learn better from reading, you can check out the Events documentation right here. For those who learn better with the use of audio-visual aid, Google has also created a video that details the new Events feature.

The first subject being discussed in this Hangout is Google Places autocomplete. It’s essentially the same autocomplete feature that you have on Google Maps. The difference is that you can control what autocomplete finds via a check system. The demo shows them checking off establishment to use autocomplete to find specific businesses.

The team then switches focus to talk about the advantages of search over autocomplete. They say that autocomplete is for those who already know what they want to find. Search is used more for those people who want to explore the map to find places that fit into categories like apartments, restaurants or government buildings.

A cool feature in search for the Places API is that you can find the top 20 most prominent places around a certain radius. After detailing the center of your radius, Places API will return the most prominent places as determined by the API.

During the Q&A session, they discuss some topics like public and private events via the Places API. You can make the events public or private, but you should know that the events are only available via your app. They also discuss the various ways you can add a location into Google Places. There are multiple ways to index locations so make sure you get your business in there now.

Check out the video below to see all the work being done on the Google Places API.