Decider Enters Local Search
Humorous faux-newspaper, The Onion, has launched a new local directory site called Decider in beta. While The Onion is famous for its satirical “news” articles, Decider is a decidedly serious guide intended to complement their other offerings like serious classifieds and the A.V. Club (The Onion’s arts and entertainment site).
Decider brings local business listings for bars, restaurants, music venues, events, and reviews. It appears to be targeted to the college-to-early-thirties demographic, and sports advertisements on the pages.
When I heard about Decider, I immediately though, “oh, yet another business directory site among the many others,” — a thought apparently shared to some degree by Andrew Shotland. (more…)
Popularity: 1% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/28/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Local Search, Local Search Optimization, News, Online Directories, Yellow Pagesbusiness directory, Decider, local directory, Local Search
SMX LoMo Keynote: Gur Kimchi
Gur Kimchi, Principle Architect for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, also spoke Thursday morning at the SMX Local & Mobile conference in San Francisco.
Gur Kimchi, Principal Architect, Microsoft Virtual Earth
Gur provided a lot of demonstrations of existing and upcoming features from the Virtual Earth teams:
Popularity: 5% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Conferences, MSN Search, Research and DevelopmentLocal Search, Maps, MicroSoft, SMX LoMo, SMX-Local-&-Mobile, Virtual Earth
SMX LoMo Keynote: Frazier Miller
Frazier Miller, General Manager of Yahoo! Local, spoke yesterday here at the SMX Local & Mobile conference in San Francisco.
It was very interesting to hear the take on local & mobile from one of Yahoo! Local’s top thought leaders. It was obvious that Frazier has a very tight grip on understanding what motivates consumers and where the trends may be headed in local/mobile evolution.
Some highlights of Frazier’s presentation included:
Popularity: 6% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/25/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Conferences, Local Search, Mobile Search, YahooLocal Search, Mobile Search, SMX LoMo, SMX-Local-&-Mobile, Yahoo-Local
Yellow Pages Guerilla Ad Campaign
I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies (”SES”) Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the YellowPages.ca booth in the exhibit hall:
I’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the thing very friendly-looking, and the geek in me was drawn to the near-real-time search volume graph they had playing up on one screen. (more…)
Popularity: 12% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/30/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Advertising, Local Search, Online Directories, Yellow Pages, brand namesAd-Campaigns, Advertising, Guerilla-Marketing, Local Search, Yellow Pages
Local Search Behemoth InfoSpace Cashed Out
Last year when InfoSpace decided to sell off Switchboard, other directories, and their mobile services, I wondered if they were just cashing out. Yesterday’s New York Times article, “Once an Internet Giant, InfoSpace Dismantles Itself“, would appear to verify that they did indeed cash out.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/24/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: News, brand namesbrand names, InfoSpace, Intelius, Local Search
Can NearbyNow Escape The Fate of Local Shopping Search Engines?
Greg Sterling points out that a number of companies are attempting to build out inventories of local brick-and-mortar stores and expose this info via search capabilities. Greg notes that NearbyNow has just raised $11.75 million in additional funding, and that there are compelling reasons to believe that local product shopping search satisfies a lot of user needs and conforms to existing shopping behavior. Greg states:
Every shopping engine that doesn’t have this local store data will suffer at the hands of those that do. The significance of this and its potential impact on online shopping (and by extension mobile) cannot be overstated.
My initial gut reaction to NearbyNow is along the lines of: “I’ve seen this during the era of dot-bombs, and it didn’t work — why should it work now?” (more…)
Popularity: 13% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/19/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Local Search, Mobile Search, SearchingLocal Search, Mobile Search, NearbyNow, Product Search, Shopping Search
Will Geolocation Become Ubiquitous?
Chris Messina at Citizen Agency has just blogged about how he believes that geolocation data will become ubiquitous for websites to use, and this sort of contextual information about users will form a new layer of information that will available to all internet applications.
I find myself a bit skeptical, just because geolocation data has been around for so long now, and I’ve heard people saying that it will revolutionize how information is presented to us for quite some time. This concept is nothing new, though if you look at it from the perspective that Messina has provided, it’s a fairly compelling-feeling twist as a sort of infrastructure given that could and should be incorporated in the planning and development of any given internet site — particularly social ones — at their very inception.
What isn’t plain is just how integral all the locative information could be, considering the issues of unknowable error rates involved in geolocation data (see the section on “The issue of error rates” in “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space And Key To Click-Fraud Detection“) and consumer interest group resistance to pinpointing of users’ locations based upon privacy concerns (just today there was an article on how groups are complaining to the FTC about the ease of geo-pinpointing of users of mobile devices). I wish he’d touched on those aspects in some way, although I do like the techno-evangelist spin he’s provided on location as a foundational aspect in site design.
Update: Susan Mernit, formerly of Yahoo!, also points out that security is a major concern for applications like dating sites, and that there’s consumer irritation involved with some contextual advertising.
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/06/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Futurism, Local Search, Maps, Mobile Searchgeographic location, Geolocation, Local Search
Independent Contractors Excluded from Google Maps
My article on How To Get On Google Maps Without An Address pubbed today on Search Engine Land - it outlines one of the top most frustrating issues facing some small businessmen who need to have listings in directories without including their street addresses. Google Maps, by policy, does not display listings for those who do not have street addresses, so smaller providers who might actually provide the best quality service work are left out in the cold when users perform local searches. Independent contractors (like plumbers, electricians, building contractors, etc) are the most affected by this issue, but some other businesses are also impacted.
My perception is that this lack of what is something of a standard among traditional yellow pages directories is due to Google’s desire to provide best user-experience. In a map search display, does it make sense to display items which can’t be pinpointed to the map?
My opinion is that it does make sense to do so, (more…)
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/11/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Maps, Online Directories, Yellow Pagesdirectories, Google-Maps, independent contractors, Local Search, Yellow Pages
Zvents Launches Federated Local Search
Zvents announced today their launch of a new, blended search results page for local content. Now, when you do searches on their site, they’ll bring back results for various businesses, events, performances, movies, store sales and more in your local area. Here’s a screengrab of the newly-blended results page:
You can see little icons to the right side of the listings which indicate what type of listing each result represents.
Google’s move to Universal Search in the past year and their recent move to expand out the local one-box results from a few listings to ten would indicate that user-testing is showing blended results to be a very popular item among search engine users. Zvents move to provide blended results makes them a very strong contender as a provider for local search and content technology. As Greg Sterling mentions, Zvents is a provider for syndicated content for third parties like newspapers, and they’re clearly positioning themselves as a potential backend for other local content sites wanting to have functionality similar to Google’s.
From trying out Zvents’ new functionality,
Popularity: 34% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Design, Local Search, Searchingblended results, federated search, Local Search, Universal-Search, zvents
Google Sending More Traffic To Google Maps
The New York Times today reported on a recent Hitwise post by Heather Hopkins highlighting that Google was now sending about three times as many of their users over to Google Maps comparing a week ending January 6th with a year ago.
This is apparently due in part to Google recommending Google Maps instead of recommending other mapping providers in addition as it had been doing early last year. (more…)
Popularity: 46% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/14/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps, Market DataGoogle-Maps, Local Search, Mapquest
