A deeper look at the real PlaceRank and local search opportunity
A thought to get this started: The way Google analyzes links online is really just a mass analysis of human opinions. The analysis of links offline, using mass amount of mobile device location data is the mass analysis of human actions. What people say and what they do can be entirely different things.
So anyone that’s been around the online advertising world will be familiar with the famous Google Page Rank algorithm. While maybe no one other than Larry and Sergey truly knows how it works, there are literally small armies of SEM and SEO experts that wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat wondering if they left out an important keyword, or whether they need to pay for links to get a boost for their clients. It’s a fascinating micro economy that has developed almost exclusively around servicing customers and their interaction with Internet search providers, particularly Google and its $20B in annual revenue.
I haven’t bought search in well over a decade, before Google existed, and am by no means an expert in search, let alone local search, but if you’re looking for more information I’d suggest starting out by reading SEOmoz or Greg Sterlings Skreenwerk blog or reaching out to a local search SEO specialist like David Mihm or Mike Blumenthal who are frequent speakers on those circuits and regularly share some invaluable experiences on their blogs at Mihmorandum and Blumentahals.
But to greatly over simplify, fundamentally there are two main components in play for Google on the web, and how well they translate into a true mobile location aware search is fuzzy at best. So for the current Google web search here are two key factors being looked at:
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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
A Look at Local.com
I was over at AdTech last week, trying to scope out the latest and greatest happening in location. Unlike a few weeks earlier at the search engine marketing conference SMX East, where local search was quite a hot topic, permeating many booths and break out sessions. The local emphasis among the larger internet marketing community seemed much more subdued. Folks like Quova, who have provided geo IP targeting oriented solutions for websites for years had updated their offering to include mobile location aware targeting through a third party partnership with Navizon, which was a nice extension but nothing too exciting.
A company called HelloMetro was busy trying to build up city oriented sites to compete with Citysearch… although it sounds like they’re still a long way off for the moment in terms of size.
The biggest booths seemed reserved for folks trying to create local business directories for consumers like Local.com and Localpages.com and also ReachLocal.com which is trying to create a platform for buying and selling local ads across the existing and search, directory and display ecosystem.
In the current age of search and with all the innovations that the existing search engines are doing to infer local intent (Google 10-pack), the idea of going back and creating a local directory seems so old school, but there they are.
Here is a drill down on what I picked up about Local.com
There are a couple of different components to their business: Read more
Retail-ization of Google Search Results
What’s the fuss about? Well before the recent change if you performed a Google search for a term like “dentist”, “florist” or “lawyer” you would normally get links to other WEBPAGES with content about “dentists”, “florists” and “lawyers’. So for example a search for the term lawyers would have links to the Wikipedia entry on lawyers and lawyers.com, and about 100 million other pages like it… in other words connecting the Google searcher to more and more INFORMATION about the subject of “lawyers”. But now with the change that seems to have been put in place, Google is trying to infer the intent of the searcher in some instance… assuming that maybe the user doesn’t want to find more INFORMATION about lawyers in the general sense, but instead wants to be able to locate a real nearby lawyer.
In case you’re wondering, Google evidently uses standard IP lookup to determine the location of the searchers computer in order to give the appropriate geographically relevant results… see above an example of the SERP from a search for the term ‘coffee’ from a PC in midtown Manhattan.
Enormous leap toward Google embracing location awareness as a core element of search? Or simply Google trying to further improve the search experience and giving people the results that they most often want?
You Deserve a Rake Today at Ickdonalds
Some interesting posts over at Blumenthals.com (currently one of my new favorite blogs along with Maperture) about Google’s decision to allow anyone to modify Google Maps placemarkers and the information contained within, until the listing is claimed by the true listing ‘owner’. It turns out that disgruntled customers (or employees) are taking the opportunity to disparage businesses that have wronged them by taking over their listing and doing not so nice things to it… perhaps you’ll really enjoy the fries from that Ickdonalds, even if it is strangely situated in the middle of Lake Erie!
It does bring up some interesting issues like why in the world would Google not regulate this more closely and why they feel the need to allow users to have free reign over a core part of a Google product… even when it has the potential to erode the quality of the product.
I think the answer is tied to both the economic and ideals over at Google.
While Google of course has more money than God and can and does spend money easily without a clear path to a return on investment, the time and effort it would take to develop a monitoring and filtering technology to handle this is not insignificant, particularly for something like Google Maps which is probably not yet a significant contributor of revenue. In fact Google set this precedent as the preferred modus operandi back when they acquired YouTube and opted at first just to take down copyright infringing content rather than trying to filter videos as they went up. The Viacom suit of course changed that.
What it also seems to be saying is that the current state of POI map data is not where it needs to be. Afterall, if everything was accurate and up to date, why would you need to leverage the crowdsourcing in the first place. And if Google WERE to build or license something similar to what they used to filter for copyright infringement for YouTube, they’d need a “master copy” of the “correct” data against which to cross reference… which of course doesn’t exist and would be a full time job to create and maintain… ask Navteq… and besides if they had that in the first place, there would be no need to crowdsource it and the issue would be moot.
The other part of the answer is that Google is not a content company… ie their mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” … so nothing in there about creating original information itself or ensuring the quality of the information, they just help you find it… no matter how much it may suck. So the ideal in Googleland would likely be that all the POIs just existed out there in the world and they would happily make a copy, store, index and help you find the stuff you’re looking for and be on their merry way.
But alas, all the worlds information doesn’t always cooperate they way you’d sometimes like.
