Foursquare is bolstering its non-mobile presence by migrating its "Explore" feature to desktops.

The tab, which was added to Foursquare.com on Wednesday, harnesses the site's database of all the 1.5 billion checkins logged into its system. Explore was originally introduced as part of Foursquare 3.0 last March. The tab supplanted Tips and let users query for recommendations or dive into food, coffee, nightlife, shops and arts and entertainment recommendations served up by Foursquare and ranked by what’s most interesting to the user. At the time, the company positioned Explore as a real-world counterpart to recommendations on Amazon and Netflix.

Alex Rainert, head of product for Foursquare, says the desktop version of Explore is geared toward people who are planning to take a trip, but also for the average Foursquare user, who still spends a lot of time on his PC. (Foursquare's website gets 1 million unique visitors a day, supporting Rainert's argument.) Rainert says he personally has used the desktop Explore to find a sushi restaurant in his neighborhood. "I was looking for one I haven't tried, but I was looking for social validation," he says.

Foursquare has lots of competition for the web-based local recommendations from Yelp and Google, which bought Zagat in August. Foursquare has a tangled history with Google. The company acquired early location-based social networking service Dodgeball in 2005, only to eventually shut it down and see founder Dennis Crowley leave to start Foursquare. Yet the addition of Explore on desktops is less about competing with those rivals than offering a multimedia experience for Foursquare users.

If you're looking for another free desktop recommendation engine, Explore isn't bad. To try it out, I typed "burritos" and "gyros" into the system and Explore produced a few locales. If you use the "zoom out" feature, you'll see even more. However, Explore has far fewer reviews than Yelp in most cases.

What do you think? Will you check out Explore on your PC or do you still consider Foursquare just for mobile? Let us know.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, arakonyunus