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.

The Gold Star Approach for Small Businesses: If you’re really good Google will give you a sticker!

A few months back, google created placepages for every place on Earth. If one of those places happens to be a business, Google obviously hopes that the business takes an interest in its placepage and engages with them to improve it and make it better. This week Google launched a Google “favorite places” sticker program that encourages local brick and mortar business owners to claim their local business center listing and to add information to their PlacePages.

Google has annouced that it will initially select 100k of the most sought out and researched businesses on Google (~1% of the 28 Million U.S. businesses) and send them window sticker which passerby’s can scan with a special reader on their phone in order to read and submit reviews as well as receive special coupons.

I am not so sure this one will be a big driver… is a Google favorite places sticker likely to do much for retailers? I am not so sure… I suspect that only the geekiest of the geeks will be standing on the sidewalk whipping out a cellphone to snap a picture of that QR code and stand there flipping through reviews. By the time you’re standing by the front window of an establishment, I suspect your five senses and a guage of how tired your legs are or how bad traffic is will guide your decision. I am just not sure that standing directly outside the store is the time when folks are going to do 10 minutes of web research on their decision on whether to enter or not.

Just give consumers the information they want and figure the rest out later.

The mobile local discovery market is quickly filling up with applications that allow you to do either free form searches or to navigate through a directory to discover what is around you. But searching and navigating is work, especially on many small and clunky mobile devices. So Google also announced a new feature which will appear on the Google mobile hopepage where you can do away with all that messy searching and navigating and simply ask to see everything nearby me now.

 This is a great feature, sometimes people just don’t know what they want, so why force them to make decisions via search of directories? In the real world there is plenty of serendiptious discovery happening as you walk or drive down the street… why should the experience on your mobile device be any different.

Give people more, more, more stuff to search for… like real time local store inventory information

 Knowing that there is a nearby WalMart is nice. But knowing that the nearby WalMart has your favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in stock for $2.99 a pint is nicer. Allowing searchers to go deeper than general store level details with their search is a no brainer. You don’t buy a WalMart… you buy the stuff in WalMart. But this is not anything new, there are a lot of folks that have gone down this path, the key will be how many inventory systems Google can get into and how well it can infer what I want. Google has shown that it can kick ass in the world of cachable, contextual web pages, text and hyperlinks, but the jury is still out in terms of organizing and sorting through large volumes of non contextual, stand alone raw data sitting by itself in an inventory system somewhere.

I suspect it will be a while before product level mobile searches are commonplace, either that or life for the local WalMart marketing manager is about to get a hell of a lot more complicated!

Give people new easy ways to search: If you can see it you can search it.

 Is typing or speaking just too much work? Well Google Goggles, was just announced for Andoid phones, and uses the phones camera to do the work for you. Simply snap a photo of something and Google will try to figure out what it is and return relevant information about it. For small businesses, you don’t even need to take a picture, just hold up the phone camera to capture imagery of the outside of the business, and Google provides a link to that retailers Placepage.

This by far the most gee whiz announcement from a technological perspective, and like the favorite places sticker program seems very much designed to generate excitement among the small brick and mortar retailer community to get them engaged with their Google PlacePages and with Google in general. It certainly seems like nifty technology and if it ever comes available for the iPhone I’d certainly give it a whirl. But as with the sticker program, I wonder how much use Google Goggles will see in the real world. So far most of the visual and augmented reality I’ve seen so far is pretty limited in their practical applications, or at least don’t provide much advantage over the readily available alternatives. But without being able to play with it hands on, its hard to say how impactful it will be, but let’s just say I am a bit skeptical.

Well, one solution is to grow the whole pie by growing the gross number of searches conducted. So how do you do that? For starters you make it super easy and convenient to run a search query, like search on a mobile phone (Google Mobile) while you’re out and about and while at your desk through a browser toolbars that is always there, ready and waiting (Google Toolbar). Second you try to get more and more of the world’s information into the index to make it findable, for example by scanning book or making it easy for any Joe Schmo to create new information say like in a blog on Blogger (acquired 2003).

In fact, the worldwide web has grown like wildfire over the past decade with the Google index growing from 26 million pages in 1998 to 1 billion pages in 2000 and an estimated 1 trillion today. So needless to say there is a lot of information out there to be found, and Google’s success has been built on developing the best mousetrap to help folks sift through those 1 trillion pages and find the information they’re looking for, largely relying on that popularity contest dressed up as a math equation called PageRank to help us uncover the needles among those 1 trillion straws of hay.  

Here was my experience with Nearby.

The Woodstock Hippie
So I loaded up Nearby. Very nice and slick, and great presentation. I love the fact that you could quite easily make modifications to your current location by moving the map and not the icon, genius!

Then I thought I’d look for something… well anything. So I started by searching for a nearby Cuban restaurant by typing in ‘Cuban’ , the results were random. No sign of the Cuban restaurant literally a block or so away, but it did show me the name Margon’s at around 6th and 46th… much further uptown. To be specific… it didn’t tell me the first thing about Margon’s… just the word “Margon’s” and the helpful fact that it was “1,071 meters from you” and “posted by funkeboodha a while ago”. Now even if I was BFF with Mr. Funkeboodha, I am still not sure I’d haul my butt up to 6th and 46th (1,071 meters no less!) and give it a try based on that info.

After a web search it turns out that Margon’s is a little hole in the wall Cuban restaurant that may indeed be worth trying, but that’s not the point, it wasn’t particularly nearby (particularly versus alternatives) and didn’t give me enough information to make a decision either way.

Ok, so then I figured maybe Nearby is not a great tool for finding restaurants so let me just go with the flow and explore what’s popular with the Nearby community… maybe there is exciting stuff happening all around me that I never realized before! So I tap on the ‘Popular’ button and tap on the first little blue post it note I see nearby called ‘Tiger’ which brings me to two posts “Tiger” and “Winky”. One tap deeper I learn that Tiger is a dead cat (including a picture of him before he was dead), and that Winky seems to be an alive Persian cat that evidently got to sit in Santa’s lap this past holiday season…. And that they both live a mere 540 meters away around 32nd street, between 2nd and 3rd! Woo hoo, now we’re getting somewhere!

Ok, so moving right along, I gave it one last try by trying to explore the Nearby “collections”. A collection seems to be a set of POIs around a common them, posted by a Nearby community member… alas finally a little organization! This area seems particularly popular with people posting their favorite restaurants, buildings, and things to do for their friends to see. Besides many personal favorite things to do and and see, nearby collections for me included Great Buildings (5 in total in NYC including Chelsea Market), Important Protests (2 in total), Grand Tour Architecture (3 in total). Lame, Lame and Lame.

So you can see why visions of hippies come to mind… I can hear them now… “aw sure man, it’s cool, you can post anything you want man, anything! No rules at all, if you want to make a map of all the places where you and Yoko did sit in’s in 1965 and quit halfway through go right ahead… it’s all cool man. No worries”

And that is exactly what you get, a big muddy mess.