Local.com, which as you might imagine covers geographically local business search, has launched a new events site at http://events.local.com/.

When you visit the site it takes a guess at where you are (you can correct it if it’s wrong) and from the front page gives you a list of what’s happening in your area, including music, festivals, conferences, sports, family-friendly events, etc. Click on a category and you’ll be taken to an event listing.

Now here’s the weird part: the event listings default to listing by event popularity. HUH? In other words, event listings are not in date order. If you want to go to Local.com Events and just get an idea of what kind of live music is playing this weekend, you’ll have to resort the event order before you do anything else — that’s if you even notice that the events are not in order of date. This strikes me as a bit silly; it seems to me like date-sensitive information should be sorted by date first. If you want to offer other sorting options fine, but if I go to an event listing and the first event is tomorrow and the next event listed is in March, my first conclusion is going to be, “Wow, this site doesn’t have much available.” It’s NOT going to be “Gee, I guess I should double-check my sorting options!”

(If you do sort by date, you’ll occasionally get oddness. I looked at sporting events in New York City and found several events at the same address taking place at midnight on the same day. Placeholders for other upcoming events?)

Anyway, The event listings have detail name, link, and time, but unfortunately there’s an address instead of venue name for the ones I looked at. There might be a game at so-and-so stadium, but Local.com events only lists the address for so-and-so stadium, which people might not know.

But you can get around that with the search feature. You can search for events, performers, and venues. So for example you might look at sports in New York City and find several events at 4 Penn Plaza, New York, New York 10001. You have no idea where that is. But you do a venue search for Madison Square Garden and you get that address and all the events taking place at that event. So if you want to go out somewhere and you do have a venue in mind, search by that first.

Or you can do a more general search by keyword for events. I did a New York search for circus and found 142 results — everything from Ringling to Cirque du Soleil. Of course, the first event listed was for January 18th, while the second listed was for February 13th….