When people perform a search with Google that triggers local results, they will see a list of multiple local businesses related to that search phrase, just like normal. They can click on the name of the business to visit their website, or click on the pin on the map to get local listing information. Google has changed what happens if the user clicks on the link to the Google reviews, however. In the past it would take the user to the Google+ page to read the reviews. Today, it will pop up a new overlay on the page with all the reviews listed.
From there the user can read through reviews or write their own, but they can’t browse to the company page or anything else. Once the user is done reading or writing reviews, they simply click the X or hit the escape key to go back to the Google results page. This does make it a little faster to be able to read the reviews of multiple different companies, but it would be nice if there were an option to go directly to the company page from those reviews.
This may make it easier for some people to quickly scroll through the Google+ reviews of different businesses, which will be nice. It seems likely that Google will tweak this to allow people to go directly to the company page from the reviews at some point, but other than that it is a nice improvement to the search results in my opinion.
To my knowledge there hasn’t been a press release or other announcement about this change from Google.
