O’Reilly’s Radar has two posts on Google’s integration of search into Google Earth, the first explains it, the second points to a Directions Magazine interview with the CTO of Google Earth (did you know there was a CTO of Google Earth?!).
This is the first inclusion of Google’s web crawl in Google Earth. It has had Local search for a while, but that comes from a seperate index. I think that this is just the beginning of different search types to be included in Google Earth. I don’t see any reason why Google wouldn’t continue to add geocoded content as layers. In the future I think that we can expect blogs, Orkut networks, geo-referenced websites (time to start using microformats!), and books (it has already added a geo-oreinted view to book search – example).
What would the goal be of adding more search types? Well for one this would continue to improve the product; search is powerful. Second, search can lead to ads which may lead to monetization of Google Earth