Local and Hyperlocal Search, Not Really Google’s to Lose?
You hear so much about location based apps and social networking tied back to location, but significantly less so about location based search. Everyone seems to just assume that its going to be Google, or maybe Bing stepping up to own the location based search opportunity. But I think there is a nice opportunity for a start up to step in… because as with most every company that has seen some success in doing things a certain way, it seems quite difficult for them to re think the way their business should operate to address a new market… generally preferring to shove the new thing into the way they’ve always done the old thing. And I think that’s going to happen again with local search.
One of the pieces of news that was making the rounds over the past week, at least in my little corner of the twitter-sphere was news that Watson a computer system baked up by the fun folks at IBM beat the pants off two of the all time best players on the popular trivia show Jeopardy. Like its predecessor Deeper Blue in 1997 who beat the pants off of the then world’s best human chess champion… Watson was designed from the ground up to perform a specific task, and to do it quite well thanks to modern capabilities around processing power, data storage and hundreds of simultaneous algorithms tasked with interpreting the natural human language.
But reading a bit more of the press about the event, something caught my eye, a reference to the fact that Watson doesn’t even use the Internet. Read more
Localeze + Bing versus Google + Yelp
I noticed an article from MediaPost this morning that talks about Microsoft signing a deeper relationship with Localeze recently for use in Bing’s local efforts. This is one of those fly under the radar types of news items that garners very little attention, unlike say the big fuss made over the potential Google – Yelp acquisition. It’s just another day to day type deal, so I suppose there is no reason for it to grab headlines but in my mind this type of deal between Microsoft and Localeze is much more interesting than Google and Yelp.
I love Yelp and use it frequently, and to a degree I get the rationale on why its a potentially attractive acquisition, particularly for someone like Google that is looking so aggressively at targeting the local brick and mortar businesses, and their advertising budget. Yelp has many of the right relationships with local advertisers and at the same time has a nice content creation tool and user base who rabidly create tons of local oriented content… all a very nice fit with what Google does and where they’re looking to grow.
But the deal between Microsoft and Localeze in my mind directly tries to fix something that is currently wrong when you search for local businesses. Read more
PageRank to PlaceRank Is More Than Changing a Few Letters Around
There was a great article yesterday by Chris Silvery, who works for search engine marketing firm Key Relevance and is a regular contributor to the Local’s Only Section of Search Engine Land. The article highlights some of the ways that location oriented search within Google behaves, and frankly how it very often doesn’t behave the way it ‘should’.
Per John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local from a recent TechCrunch article : ”PlaceRank is like PageRank for places, it tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the Web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.”
By the way I think it’s notable that the thing being “figured out” here is “prominence”.
Now I understand that you’ve got to start somewhere, but Read more
Google and Yelp Acquisition?
There has been a lot of buzz in the past few days about Google potentially buying Yelp for $500 million or so, a lot of back and forth, will it happen or not. A lot of folks see Yelp as just another review site for big cities, so what’s the big deal? Well here are a few reasons why Google may be interested:
Plethora of Google Location Related Announcements
Google already has an estimated million and a half advertisers, which certainly seems like a hell of a lot to most everybody else, but is it really? What is the total opportunity?
Just to keep this simple, let’s say that there are 15 million brick and mortar retailers in the U.S. (rough estimate) and that Google has 1.5 million advertisers currently as customers. Even if all the existing Google advertisers were brick and mortar advertisers and in the U.S. only they’d still only have 10% penetration of available advertisers. Now in reality over half of Google’s revenue is international and you can bet that a huge chunk of those advertisers are pure e-tailer with no physical store in sight.
There is only so much searching happening on the web and only a small percent of advertisers engaging with Google to try to reach those searchers, so if you’re Google what do you do to speed things along? Well you try to provide more stuff to search for, make it super easy to search for it, and try to engage the 90%+ of advertisers that don’t current engage with you.
So lets look at some of the newly announced efforts made over the past few days, particularly around location and expanding beyond the virtual world to the physical one. Read more
A closer look at Milo.com
Well I was a little saddened to see that NearbyNow, a company that I had looked at in some detail last spring seems to have ceased operations of their web shopping portal, and now like many others seem to be going the route of providing a platform for others, mostly magazines, to develop their own retail shopping iPhone applications. Be sure to check out the Practical E -commerce Q&A for a quick run down of what happened with Nearby Now.
But don’t fear, where one company is exiting, there is always another entering. And the latest hot entrant in the area of local product search seems to be a company called milo.com. The company just announced that it had raised $4 million in a substantially over subscribed round which included some big name VC firms and private investors.
So what is all the fuss about? Well, in case you weren’t aware e-commerce was so late 90’s… Read more
Google and AdMob: Mobile Location Ad Network Coming?
Ok by now everyone has heard the news that Google plunked down $750 million to buy Admob. It’s no secret that Google has big plans in mobile advertising, and AdMob was a leading player in the space so it shouldn’t have been all that surprising.
Tech Crunch had one of the best summaries of why it makes sense and the nice fit between the two companies… the article is definitely worth a read. My two cent summary from that article and others on the deal: Read more
Location Aware Mobile Search: Pages Vs Places
Ah the random stuff you think about when you can’t sleep at night. Tonight’s edition for me… how search engines work and how that may potentially translate to creating a search capability around people visiting places… you know places like gas stations and hamburger joints. Yeah I know, I am getting sleepy too!
I’ll be honest I don’t know very much about search engines, a few years ago I printed out a copy of Larry and Serge’s Stanford paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and read it on a cross country flight for a job interview on a related subject… needless to say I didn’t get the job and I pretty much dropped any more digging on the subject.
But after attending last weeks MetaPlaces conference and listening to the various speakers, including one on the opportunities in mobile search and also a refresher on Sense Networks, the subject is back top of mind again. Read more
Google Place Pages: Big Deal You May Have Missed
According to the official Google Blog, starting last Friday every PLACE in the world now has its own webpage.
Before getting into the details of this, a couple of interesting stats from the MetaPlaces conference that I picked up last week as background:
• There are currently 21 million small and medium sized local businesses spending an average of $4k per year on yellow page advertising (~$25B ) and other local advertising
• 75% of Internet user have used the internet in the past three months to look up a place on a map or to get driving directions
In other words:
1. there is a lot of money being spent locally, by local business to get customers to patronize their businesses
2. customers are increasingly consulting with internet base maps to find their way around and to find new businesses to patronize
So it’s just a matter of time before those local business owners begin to direct some of that $4k per year to the providers of internet and mobile map services. Read more
Mobile Search Will Beat and Steal Lunch Money From Mobile Display Advertising
A great blog post over at Local Search News about the mobile local opportunity. Definitely worth the full read, but key take aways for me was the expected shift in ad dollars on mobile to move away from the largely display oriented stuff we see today toward an explosion of mobile search revenue. The Kelsey Group shows display revenue at over 60% of total 2008 mobile ad revenue, but sinking to just under 10% by 2013, mostly as the result of massive search growth from a mere $39 million to a whopping $2.27B or around 70% of all mobile ad spending in just five years.
I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.
An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.
Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending. 
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