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Long Hill's experience with Local Search
Marty Himmelstein, Long Hill's principal, punctuated his consulting
practice for a bit more than four years, while working for Internet start-up
Vicinity Corporation. Vicinity was a leading provider of private label
business locator, mapping, and Internet Yellow Page services.
Vicinity's coporate office was in Palo Alto, and its engineering
office was in Lebanon NH, in the Upper Connecticut River Valley.
Vicinity's engineers produced first-rate software, free of the
distractions at the Internet eye of the storm.
Vicinity had a successful IPO launch in March, 2000 (but a rockier landing ...).
Microsoft purchased Vicinity in December, 2002.
Marty was a key member of the technical staff, and as the manager of the database group,
provided technical direction for Vicinity's database and search technologies.
Marty played a key role in these achievements, among others:
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Vicinity was the private label provider of Yahoo's Internet Yellow Pages service,
until Yahoo brought the service in-house. Vicinity layered its
own spatial access methods on top of a standard RDBMS, an approach
that was orders of magnitude more efficient than any attempt at using
a vendor provided add-in would have been.
- Our work on efficiently
combining geospatial and keyword based searching led to
US patent 6,282,540.
- Marty was a key developer and proselytizer for Geosearch, Vicinity's
innovative approach for geo-enabling web content. Vicinity joined with
Northern Light to produce the first large-scale deployment of a
geo-enabled search engine.
(See press release.)
This work led to US patent 6,701,307.
- Co-winner with Cincinnati Bell of The Kelsey Group's
1998 Local Internet Service Award for
best Vendor Application for our work on the Cincinnati Bell Yellow Pages.
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Developed BrandFinder, to provide a distribution mechanism to allow Vicinity
clients such as Starbucks, Ford, and Levi's, to broaden their reach on the
Internet.
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Some source data for the Internet Yellow Pages is better than others.
War stories on how we tried to clean up this data are not for the faint
of heart. Get in touch with us if you want, or think you need, to know more.
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