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.

After hearing the wonders of NearbyNow on last weeks Placecast Location Based Advertsing Teleconference, I figured I’d give it another spin. For those not familiar with NearbyNow they promise the ability to find the products you’re looking for in a retail store near you, from their website:

NearbyNow was founded to simplify shopping for today’s consumers who browse online but buy in stores. By allowing shoppers to find products, brands, or sales locally, and to scan the inventory at any given shopping center, we provide a convenient shopping experience for the consumer and an effective marketing tool for merchants looking to motivate local customers.

The last time I used NearbyNow was a year ago, when I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store for the items I was looking for, so I wasn’t overly optimistic that things had improved but I gave it a try anyway…

I started with the bike helmet for my son… on Friday he took a nasty spill on his scooter on the way home from a special dad’s trip to ickdonalds and he got a bad scrape on his face… luckily he was wearing his beat-up old frog helmet which generally did its job. However, I got nasty looks from the moms in the park all weekend, so I’ve decided that he simply can’t have a big ol’ scrape on his face AND a helmet with the outer plastic shell missing and the strap jury rigged together, or I may just have one of the moms call CPS on me.

So I went into NearbyNow in search of a cool kid bike/scooter helmet. I did find a virtual picture and price on a helmet that fit the bill, but when I went to check on its availability at first I was told that the store wasn’t open right now and that the store would open at 9a… the problem is that it was already 11:25a local NYC time… so it seems that NearbyNow isn’t adjusting store hours for the location of the user relative to the store, only relative to California… wait I thought NYC was the center of the universe, evidently in tech land the Bay Area would be the center.

The second problem is that the store in question has been closed for probably close to a year now, maybe two… but thankfully I received an email from NearbyNow apologizing for not being able to validate the items availability because the store is “extremely busy” (busy being closed for a year that is)! So just for fun, I decided to call the closed store with the number that NearbyNow had provide and got what I believed to be a pre recorded message in Spanish, without anything that I could tell having to do with sporting goods.

Next stop Amazon, I picked up a cool Ben 10 helmet that will be here on Thursday, I think I can convince him to stay off the scooter until then.

Next I tried NearbyNow for a laptop battery… with equally dissapointing results. Evidently there is nowhere in Manhattan to walk into a store and buy at laptop battery over the counter, instead I was diverted to a variety on online e-tailers. It is possible I suppose that this is entirely accurate… I’ve seen a lot of odd specialty stores these days including a napping store (MetroNaps), peanut butter and jelly shop and shave shop, but have never seen a laptop battery store, so maybe that one was legit.

Finally I seemed to have a little more luck getting a case for my iphone. There was a thin looking one from Case Mate called Barely There and two Radio Shacks a couple of blocks away allegedly carried it. After receiving another ‘sorry they’re not open yet’ and the “sorry we can’t check availability because the store is very busy” notice from NearbyNow I was beginning to wonder if the guy from NearbyNow whos jobs is to call the store on your behalf had found a MetroNaps store he liked and decided not to check out.

Rather that waiting for him to wake up from his nap and let me know if the item was in stock I ventured out to Radio Shack #1 to see what they had. En route I passed a number of other stores including a Staples and two or three mom and pop phone stores that likely had cases, but was determined to make it to Radio Shack. Well it turns out that Radio Shack #1 didn’t exist, in its place was a GameStop. But fortunately the second Radio Shack was a mere two blocks away buried in the second floor of a mall… and voila as advertised they had both the blue and orange Case Mate Barely There cases for sale at the price I had seen on NearbyNow. In fact it was helpful that I knew what I was looking for because for some reason the store had the Case Mate products on the other side of the store at boot level, not displayed with the other two dozen or so phone accessory items and I had to ask the sales clerk if they had any other cases before being directed to what I was looking for. In case you were wondering the store was completely empty, except for the two store clerks staring into the mall out of boredome, so that “store is very busy” message from NearbyNow is still a mystery.

Overall NearbyNow wasn’t a great experience, but it did come in handy and after some work I did find what I was looking for with one of my three items. I played around with a few other searches, for example for ‘paper’ within office products catgeory and was directed to Toys R Us and Sears 2-3 miles away, when there is a Staples directly across the street. So it seems that they have a limited number of retailers participating which makes it pretty hit and miss.