The local search engine settings manager allows you to define a localization that will be used with the search engines that support this feature.

Here you can define a location by it's name, longitude and latitude. Also you can define the search span.

The local settings you define here will reflect in the Search engine panel from the Project settings dialog, where a new search engine will appear after restaring the application with the name: "SearchEngine Local LocalSettingsName" (i.e Google Local California)

Latitude and longitude are specified in degrees for both the center point and the search span.

At the equator, one degree of latitude or longitude is equal to about 69 miles, or 111 kilometers. As you go north or south of the equator, the degrees of latitude remain the same, but one degree of longitude shortens to approximately the cosine of the latitude multiplied by 69 miles. So, at 40 degrees north latitude, a degree of longitude is about 46 miles.

Let's see an example. The parameters you enter in this dialog translate to the following URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=pizza&sll=36.974,-122.030&sspn=0.05,0.05&hl=en

The query above is looking for "pizza" within 0.05 degrees of longitude and 0.05 degrees of latitude from latitude and longitude 36.974, -122.030, which is actually the center of Santa Cruz, CA.

As you can see in the browser there are 4,407 results for pizza. If we change the degrees of longitude and latitude to 10, we get:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=pizza&sll=36.974,-122.030&sspn=10,10&hl=en

Now there are 43,616 results for pizza, and you have searched the entire California state.