I think what it means is that Google had lots of queries of the form: <thing> (e.g. "restaurant") <location> (e.g "Times Square") that came in through the searc

I think what it means is that Google had lots of queries of the form: <thing> (e.g. "restaurant") <location> (e.g "Times Square") that came in through the search engine "front door". Having a lot of relevant questions (and hard data on which answers to those questions were used) is an invaluable resource in bootstrapping mapping and local search together.