Last week Fwix launched the beta version of their hyperlocal search engine, which it is calling a Local Trend Search Tool, and the blogs are abuzz.

If you haven’t heard of it, Fwix is a local news aggregator that allows users to streamline their news feeds (which include blogs and social media) based on their locations and interests into their own customized homepages. Fwix was founded in October 2008 by Darian Shirazi, and its initial purpose was to streamline news and information on the internet based on a user’s location.

I hadn’t heard of this site before and decided to take it for a spin. Upon registering as a user, Fwix suggests topics of interest for you based on your city. Since I’m in Milwaukee, WI, it suggested the Brewers, Lake Michigan, and, of course, beer.

What’s a hyperlocal search engine, you ask? Matt McGee from Search Engine Land explains, “Where real-time search answers ‘What’s happening right now?’, hyperlocal search answers the question, ‘What’s happening right here?’ It’s like local search on steroids, you could say.”

To demonstrate one of the advantages of hyperlocal search, I give you the following example: Last Thursday, a couple hours before the Brew City Flood hit my area, I did a general Google search for “Jazz in the Park, Milwaukee” in an effort to find information on whether it had been canceled due to rain and got a slew of results. However, none pertained to the status of the event that evening.

Then, I ran a search from my Fwix homepage using just “Jazz in the Park”. Since Fwix already knew my location, there was no need to enter any location keywords. The first two results were articles from local news sites that let me know the weekly event had, in fact, been canceled due to inclement weather.

Now, that’s what I call results!