Long Hill Consulting, LLC

About Local Search

Local search refers to geographically-oriented search on the Internet. Local search applications, such as the Internet Yellow Pages and mapping services have been popular from the Internet's earliest days. As a source for consumer-oriented business information, local search today provides a poor user experience because it does little more than package old data for a new medium. As a source for neighborhood related information on the activities of daily life, it does no better.

The Internet's great potential for providing accurate, thorough, and current information about local activity is going unmet. This deficiency is somewhat surprising, given that annual spending on local advertising in the USA is $22 billion, $14 billion of which goes towards the print Yellow Pages. Only a small amount of the total is currently spent on the Internet. The deficiency is also predictable because spending on local search is being driven by maximizing advertiser revenue, not creating the best user experience.

The Internet is poised to be the medium of choice for distributing and aggregating local information. In addition to the size of the market, three observations lead to this conclusion:

The most important predictor of the intensity of an individual's Internet usage is the availability of a broadband connection. Broadband access changes the Internet from an occasional tool, to "an always on information appliance." By early 2004, 55 percent of all US adult Internet users had access to a high speed connection. Further, the number of adult Americans who had broadband Internet connections at home increased 60 percent from the same time in 2003, to 24 percent.
The Internet is already a rich source of local content. Approximately 20 percent of web pages contain an easily identifiable geographic reference in the form of an address or telephone number.
Even without an overarching mechanism for accessing local data, people do lots of local searches already. A reasonable lower estimate of user searches that are local in nature is 20 percent.

The features that a mature local search will embody are simple to state. Providers of local data - businesses, hobbyists, social groups, classified advertisers, municipal organizations, and so forth, will directly control the local data about themselves that is disseminated on the Internet. Internet services will provide the tools for distributing this data so that it is current, thorough, and accurate. Some of this local search data will be structured, so that it can be reasoned about.

Local search will subsume, even if it doesn't replace, the functionality currently delivered by the print and Internet Yellow Pages, classified advertisements, regional publications, and other media outlets that are used for distributing local information.

The topics discussed here are given fuller treatment in Marty Himmelstein's February, 2005 IEEE Computer article Local Search: The Internet IS the Yellow Pages.

More detail on Long Hill's experience in local search is on the next page.

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More: Local Search Experience

Read Marty Himmelstein's article on Local Search in the Feb. 2005 IEEE Computer ...

I joined Marty Himmelstein at Vicinity Corporation shortly after he and his coworkers developed the initial implementation of Geosearch. It's been obvious to me from the start that Marty has spent an enormous amount of time and energy thinking deeply about the problems associated with tying Internet searching to geographic location. I believe he brings together fundamental knowledge about the theory of geosearch, the details of implementation, and the practical business realities of how search will evolve in the real world. I've often said that you don't have to agree with Marty, but you ignore him at your own peril.

Dave Goldberg
Programmer