Think Locally, Act Globally

It appears the boys at Google have some grand ambitions for local search. While they've been getting lots of press and making tons of money for conquering the world, they've quietly been placing some effort on helping you find a pizza or where to get your shirt starched.

Check out this report on their progress photographing every commercial street in the US at resolution sufficient to see the store hours hanging in the front window of every store. This effort is interesting but certainly not central to success in local search. But is shows, like the recent beta launch of local.google.com, that these guys are taking local search seriously. Another smart move.

When someone produces a local search engine that can provide both comprehensive and relevant results, hundreds of billions of searches and tens of billions of advertising dollars will follow. Consider this - Google and Overture have only 150,000 clients each - and they're earning billions of dollars in revenue. (These clients numbers were quoted by company representatives at a recent conference I attended). Imaging how much they'll earn when millions of businesses are 'paying per click.' Of course, they're already giving them the chance via recent changes to Adwords.

Local search is hard because there is less data available and the demands are actually higher than in 'cyberspace' searches. Local businesses tend to be in the Yellow Pages, but a huge percentage don't have web sites. While Google can buy the name/address/phone lists, they're going to find it nearly impossible to figure out all the different search terms that should apply to the business when their only clues are the company name and the Yellow Pages categorization. When the business gets a web site and gains context via its link network, there are a lot more clues for the search engines to use.

The stakes are higher because if I search for 'screen capture utility' and later find out that Google didn't include the best one in my results, I may be a little upset but will probably blame myself for not looking harder. But if I ask it for a place to have my tires changed, and later come to learn that I drove an extra 20 minutes because they didn't know about the Goodyear shop in the next town, I'm going to really be suspicious the next time I ask local.google.com for anything. Local search seams easier and sources like the yellow pages have set fairly high expectations for completeness - plus the physical world cost of leaving out a relevant result seems higher than the cyberspace equivalent.

Of course, this will all work itself out in the next few years. Success stories from local adwords will begin appearing in the next few months. Later this year there's bound to be a major update to local.google.com (maybe Barry Diller and Citysearch will get bought up with some of the Google IPO billions). Sparked by all this interest in 'local search' a renewed effort to sell millions of local businesses better web sites will heat up again (a lot of effort was spent on that in the late '90s). Those color LCDs are appearing in more and more of our cars, slipping in for navigation systems and the occasional DVD, but soon there will be wireless connections and a Google Search button on your dashboard. There will be one on your cell phone too.

Local search will be huge on the desktop, but it will really shine in the mobile world. And this doesn't even consider what happens when, in this same time frame, social networks sort themselves out and open-source ratings/opinions services become commonplace. Suddenly you can find out not only that there is a thai restaurant around the corner but that 82% of your friends rate it 3 stars or higher.

Google makes a few cents, the restaurant gets a new customers, and you get a nice meal. Better living through Google.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at May 2, 2004 01:07 PM