What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]
Wednesday April 13, 2005
Local Search Heating Up While the web seemingly spans all geographical boundaries and has created unprecedented marketplaces, I'll bet that given a choice, you'd rather do business within your community. Looks like the search engines will facilitate that as well.
Yahoo! Local is ramping up their play. They're offering the moms-and-pops free storefront websites. The hosted site gets highlighted placement in their local listing. Doesn't look like it integrates with their domain registration service but that seems like a logical development to expect. Hopefully, they'll spif up the listing's interface, Google's has a cleaner layout with a map front and center. It does the whole Ajax dance to bring up satellite photos of the area. But if there's a coup de grace from Google, it may be Google Local for Mobile Phones.
Blogging proximity will certainly play a role in the marketplaces of the future (though I'm not sure what). There are all kinds of ways for folksographies to be expressed: locations, venues and coordinates. I'm pondering ways to correlate venues with spatial tags because while virtual communities will continue to evolve free of the constraints of space, I'm convinced that sooner or later the next generation of search will bring it all home.
( Apr 13 2005, 11:30:42 PM PDT ) Permalink
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