14 Jul
Localeze is now exposing confidence scores for business listings that can be used to measure how accurate the information is for a particular business.
The scores go from 0-100 percent, and are based on reconciling the information that it sees from multiple profiles. It standardizes the info,deletes multiple entries, and adds criteria such as recent updates, etc.
A company that hasn’t changed any information for eight months won’t be scored as highly as a company that constantly maintains the listing. “Time and frequency are very important,” says Olander. Most active businesses change at least some of their information every month.
Here is a original post.
13 Mar
ChirpCity - An application written on top of Twitter that organizes tweets from and about a city. On first blush, not sure what value the application is providing. Now what would be interesting is if the the tweets were organized by category.
For e.g. When I typed (or clicked) Manhattan Beach, show me all the tweets about Restaurants, Movies, What’s happening at the beach, etc. That gives me a “real time” view that is contextualized.
Here is a rough draft with two verticals:
23 Feb
Google Maps team has added a new feature that allows you to look at the entire scope of local businesses by showing more than 10 results on the map. The idea is of using layers on the map that gets activated when there are more relevant results to show.
Below are some of the things the feature can be used for.
Neighborhood Exploration / Discovery
When visiting a new city or area, doing a search on a business category (restaurants, bars, hotels, rental cars) informs you of certain areas that have high density for that category. For e.g. I searched for “Bars in Hollywood, CA” (screenshot above) - you can, at a glance deduce that Hollywood Blvd, between Highland and Vine is where the action is. You can directly go to that street and explore.
As David Mihm points out - it’s like a Heat Map of the city which tells you the hot spots.
More Relevant Local Results
Below is a snapshot of a search for “Dry Cleaners in 90278″. The search query is already very localized as I am providing a zipcode. In the past, Google would show the top dry cleaners (perhaps based on ratings, reviews, authority, etc) but not necessarily the closest one. With the new feature (Andrew Shotland calls it K-Pack) I can quickly find that there is a few Dry Cleaners that are more closer than the ones in the top 10 results and I might not even have to take out the car for going to one.
Business Research / Market Research
As Miriam Ellis’s post points out, there is another aspect of the feature that Business enthusiasts can take advantage of. They can use this to identify the various pockets within an area that are not served well within a particular category and capitalize on that.
This feature has taken local search and exploration to a next level and the whole experience feels lightweight and fast.
Improvements?
I would like Google Maps to give me the ability to combine directions and local search. That way, when I am looking at the directions for a place I want to go to, I can find relevant businesses along that route.
05 Dec
All of us are creating fountains of ambient data, from our phones, our web surfing, our offline purchasing, our interactions with tollbooths, you name it. Combine that ambient data (the imprint we leave on the digital world from our actions) with declarative data (what we proactively say we are doing right now) and you’ve got a major, delicious, wonderful, massive search problem, er, opportunity
Again from John’s post, applying the above to the Local Search industry, there is a huge opportunity for companies to incorporate lifestreaming and microblogging in their existing system. Currently, sites like YellowPages.com, CitySearch, Yelp, etc are focused on reviews and ratings left explicitly by their users. But why not aggregate the updates from my social network about the restaurant I am looking at. Web Publishers have started doing this per topic, look at HuffingtonPost topic pages and you’ll see realtime conversations about that topic (summize widget).
So what’s stopping the local guys from innovating here?
