Looking Up: Local Data and the Real World
Google Glass may be overpriced or simply too odd for many consumers, but it still represents a manner of thinking about the interconnectedness of the internet and the world that is an inevitable outcome of current trends. With smartphones as our constant companions, we already spend a vast amount of our time looking down to look things up.
Local Search for Events: The Great Missed Opportunity
My jumping off point for this week’s column is a recent post from Greg Sterling, where he observes that despite all the impressive innovation around local search in recent years, no one has launched a truly useful local events service. I have had this feeling for years and wasn’t sure if it was just me. But if Greg doesn’t know about a local events service that truly works, I think it’s fair to say one doesn’t exist. So pay attention, developers and entrepreneurs: local events need a killer app…
Managing Local Presence on Mobile Devices: A Developing Challenge
The continued strong growth of mobile local search combined with the high value of mobile customers indicates a shift in attention is required on the part of local search publishers, in order to make it easier for businesses to manage their listing content on the devices consumers are turning to in ever increasing numbers.
How to Create a Great Vertical Directory
It’s tough for a start-up to break into the top echelon of local search players and become a one-size-fits-all solution like Google or YP. The great opportunity that exists in the space lies in serving special interests or special use cases better than anyone has before. Foursquare and Yelp are highly visible examples of this, but other very successful, vertically oriented directories exist, flying mostly under our radar…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?
The Local Conundrum: Rich Content or Accurate Information?
Google may have thought that situating local within Google+ would somehow obviate the need to fix it, but the presence of engaging content does nothing to modify the basic requirement that information services provide useful information. Perversely, information services spend too much time pretending they are content services but offer none of the openness of those services where it’s really needed…
Social Isn’t Search: Why Apple Should Think Twice About Foursquare
Though the cachet of the Foursquare name might make this idea sound appealing, my sense is that it could only be executed successfully if handled very carefully by Apple. With the prominence already given to socially driven results from Yelp, Apple would risk becoming a search service dominated by social content…
Facebook Nearby and the Mobilization of Local
At long last, Facebook has made a serious move in the local space, and Nearby now recommends local businesses based on your friends’ likes and check-ins as well as your proximity to general business listings. I can’t think of a better or a more timely summation of what’s happened in local search during the past year…
Information Wants to Be Free, but Local Data Is Currency
The sizable overlap between consumer-generated information and enterprise control is experienced every day in the world of local search.Though few local search companies could exist without licensed data, once that data gets inside their walls, it becomes a foundation upon which consumer-generated data adds value to a service…
How Mobile’s Demographic Shift Impacts Local
It seems that young people in the 18-24 demographic spend, on average, more time on mobile devices today than they do watching television. It also appears that mobile usage is far ahead of “playing games and computer use for leisure.” What does this mean for the future of local search and local media? I would say it’s not unlike the lessons the Republican Party was forced to confront in the aftermath of its recent election defeat…
Google’s Local Offerings Have Gotten Too Complicated
The extended Google+ Local rollout has been more troublesome than most. Usually when Google has experimented with social services in the past, such as Google Buzz and Google Wave, it has done so in a tangential way that does not threaten core functionality. With Google+, the gamble is to make social the center of all search activity, and yet the full realization of a social context for Google’s local search tools has yet to appear…
SMBs on Mobile: Questions of Analytics and Performance
The proliferation of mobile apps for local continues, with all major local search players maintaining their own apps, and Apple’s App Store currently returning 347 results for the phrase “local search.” With all of this attention, the time is not far away when businesses will begin to get concerned about the presence, accuracy, and effectiveness of their listings on mobile apps. I’d love to see a service that aims at comprehensive analysis of SMB presence across the “app space” for Android and Apple…
Memo to Google: Solve the Local Data Problem With Local Data
I think we can now state definitively that the big upsurge in claimed listings that might have occurred as a result of Google’s choice to embed local listings within its social network, a little over five months ago, will not happen on its own. Rather than achieving Facebook levels of adoption, Google+ Local is still an arena where participation depends heavily on early adopters as well as the assistance of local SEO consultants and companies like mine…
The Role of Directories in the New Local Ecosystem
Marissa Mayer’s announcement that Yahoo would be moving its focus away from local search, along with some other significant factors in the developing local ecosystem, calls into question the continued viability of a robust marketplace of local directory and search sites. Here are a few harbingers of a potentially more consolidated future…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…
The Local Search Shadow Economy
We know that there exist a great number of businesses in our local communities that service a variety of needs at their clients’ homes or business locations. Aside from specialized services like Angie’s List and Service Magic, there are few local search outlets that serve potential clients or service providers well in terms of their ability to connect a need with the appropriate provider…