And most people seem happy enough that the plumbing behind Google does a pretty good job of spinning all the relevant information from everywhere on the web around like a centrifuge, drawing the good stuff that we want to the top where we can easily get to it. 

But the Google centrifuge can only work its magic on the stuff that is present in the tube. And while there is a huge amount and diversity of information out there on the web to be spun, what tends to get put out there is created by folks in the general category of ‘authors’. Web “authors” can of course be anyone from professional authors who create long, elegant and thoughtful prose for a living,  to corporate copywriters describing a box of cereal, to you and me “authoring” content  about all the crazy sh*t we did last night.   There are no arbiters of good or bad… simply tons and tons of contextual text, tags and links to be spun.

But when it comes to mobile search, as the folks that run research in this area will tell you, the stuff that we are often looking for is, well different. We’re less likely to be researching the African tree frog or stalking information about our ex gym teacher… we save that for the full 1024×768 glory of our desktop PCs.  Much of the time when conducting a mobile search we’re in search of something more specific and something directly around us in the world that we want to find or know more about.

But the problem is that since the beginning of the web, it’s been viewed as this virtual and separate world, while very much connected to the real world by its authors and what is being written about, but with very little efforts to make specific connections in real world space and time… at it’s best it’s an incredible depository of content but at it’s worse a historical dumping ground of nearly anything and everything that can be written or recorded on video.  An impressive collection of trillions of pages of inter connected content, but still generally just authored pages of web content. 

Two big areas where we’ve tried to connect back all those virtual historical pages of data directly back to specific things in the real world have been through people and places. With Facebook the current leader as the center point for information tied back to real specific people… and Facebook, Yelp, Google, Localeze and others all aggressively trying to build a similar stature as the centerpoint for information tied to places, but with no clear leader there yet.

A few months back I came across another company focused on yet another area of connecting the virtual world to physical… not with people or places, but with things. In this case things to buy in stores.

Retailigence is a San Francisco based start up that is looking to dig deep into the bowels of retail businesses, well into their inventory systems specifically, to do a better job of letting the virtual world know more about what products are available and at what color and price and most importantly where.  The company is not looking to launch the next great location aware shopping application, but instead wants to power a new era of capabilities that connect customers to the products they’re looking for by providing the core underlying data to other Internet companies through an API.  As a recent TechCrunch article points out, they’re kind of a Localeze for local product rather than place level information.

The obvious customers for their data would be folks like Milo who are specifically in the online local product search business. The not so obvious customer would be folks like Nordstrom’s  who recently opened up access to their inventory systems which gave their own internal sales staff better visibility into where product may be anywhere throughout the virtual ecommerce warehouse or in stores across the country. According to Jamie Nordstrom, the President of Nordstrom Direct, same store sales saw a 8% lift, and “inventory publishing has a significant impact”.  There is a great NY Times article with all the details worth checking out.

Just yesterday, Retailigence won the judges pick for best in show at the 2010 Under The Radar conference and during the Q&A with the judges (video below), one judge makes reference to how mainstream “high funnel” marketers could use this data in their advertising… for example Best Buy could turn a somewhat generic national online banner ad or even a magazine ad into one that features (online) or is easily linkable (magazine) to the local price and availability of that big screen Samsung LCD you’ve had your eye on. The opportunities in the traditional and digital ad and marketing ecosystem seem quite interesting.

We certainly aren’t there yet, but it seems to be getting closer to the point where a reference or search on the web with high local intent doesn’t return the entire Internet full of HTML information related to a topic, but instead recognizes our location and context and attempts to discriminate for the better about what we really want.

As cool as FourSquare is, why stop there… Mr. Best Buy CMO, if you’re listening here is what I think would be a more comprehensive way to use mobile and location data in your business:

First and foremost be sure people can find your stores when they’re looking for them… call Universal Business Listing and Localezeto make sure your complete list of stores and as much information about those stores is correctly propogated out to all the players in the geoweb… oh year and be sure to claim all of your Local Business Listings on Google. 

Want to pull more customers into your physical stores from the web and mobile web? Check out folks like milo.com, where customers can search for items carried in your store on the web and then find the closest nearby store where they can walk in and purchase it then and there… or hire some clever local SEO experts and associated content to create massive amounts of web content around all of your most popular products and tie them back to the location of each of your stores… that way digital searches for “Garmin Nuvi Detroit” lead folks to your brick and mortar stores.  

Want to better understand the people that already come into your stores why not ask someone like Sense Networks if they can drill down around your stores to see how far folks that are coming to your store are traveling to get there, where they go before and after going to your store, or if there is a nearby roadway that could should be driving more traffic but is not… it may be time to buy a new billboard on that nearby superhighway.

Want to help your suppliers and store management better understand what is selling and why? Why not talk with the folks over at Awhere.com to take a deeper dive into the demographics, weather and a variety of other geographically specific factors occurring in the areas around each store that may be having an impact. Not selling many GPS dog trackers at store #2718?  Maybe its because pet ownership in a 50 mile radius of that store only indexes as 28 versus the national average.

Once you’ve got customers in your store why not provide better in store service and create a little mobile store portal to help customers do things like find their way around (Blue Umbrella Indoor Navigation), look up consumer reviews on the items you carry and do price comparisons on items for sale, look at what you have in inventory, and leave feedback for a manager, etc.

In fact, why not just sell virtual digital goods right there in the store through the phone while you’re at it. Why not give Apple a call and remind them about that nifty digital meets physical affiliate marketing patent they filed, and see if you can put it to use by marketing music through listening stations in the store where consumers can download directly to their iPhones while providing Best Buy with a nice high margin affiliate fee for driving the download.

I am sure there is more, but that should be enough to get the ball rolling in 2010.

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. So many times I try to fire up a mobile browser in the hopes of searching for things around me, and so many times the experience is just so damn underwhelming. No sign of businesses that have existed for years and years, no understanding that I am a consumer looking to walk into a retailer and dont care if someone deep in the skyscraper in front of me runs a web LLC out of their apartment on the 25th floor.

I can still stand on the sidewalk peering into the window outside of Sohpie’s Cuban Cuisine staring at huge baskets filled with yummy empanadas and then turn and do a mobile search for the term ‘empanadas’ and end up being directed to go miles away to Empanada Joe’s, Empanada Mama’s, and Reuben’s Empanadas.

Currently the local search solutions are either far too simplistic in understanding the search query… ie search for ‘empanadas’ and get back a list of places with ‘empanada’ in their business names, or they return 372,000 page that match the place and the term ‘empanada’ which is an unwieldy mess to sort through if you’re just standing on the corner with 15 minutes of your lunch break left.

Localeze clearly has this problem in their sights and is looking to help connect mobile searchers with the closest place to fill their bellys with empanadas even if the place selling you those empandas is called Sophies.

For Google at least, there may be a day when all of those Yelpers will rave about the great empanadas at Sophies and the Google algorithm would put aside those 371k other pages, and put two and two together and match the Yelp content about empanadas at Sophies with the Sophie’s business listing and give me a great search result. But the problem for Google may be that it’s special sauce is built around links (and votes) between web pages not necessarily analyzing the content or intent of the words within pages… so whether or not Google can effectively and reliably make that connection, particularly without owning the content is still a big TBD.