Local Search - It's where we live

From a local search database perspective, there are two types of local search queries, which a search application needs to be able to answer. We can define these by borrowing from John Battelle's http://battellemedia.com book The Search. Mr Battelle describes two types of searches in this excerpt from his book "This perfect search also has perfect recall. It knows what you've seen and can distinguish between a journey of discovery, where you want to find something new, and recovery when you want to find something you've seen before."

Being that local search is inherently where we are, or where we are going to be. There are many times when a person using a local search application is trying to "recover" a bit of information or a place which they know exists.

This looking for a specific thing, trying to recover something poses problems for a web crawled index. The problem occurs, because, as we know in today's world, nearly 50% of all businesses do not have a web presence. Without a website or html based profile the various spiders, bots and slurps of the world can not recognize the existence of these local businesses. Thusly, if left to their own devices the search portals would fail at a recovery search and a recovery search is a fundamental local search query.

Recognizing the previously mentioned quandary, search applications have turned to licensing databases (such as the Localeze Local Search database). These databases contain the "base" information on all U.S. business locations, whether they have a web presence or not. Affectively, allowing a search application to answer recovery searches. The business attributes that make up "base" data, center around: business name, business address, phone number and rudimentary classification.

Driving home the importance of effectively answering recovery searches, is a recent survey by iprospect which noted: "If a search is deemed unsuccessful by the user. 27.2% of users immediately switched to another site/search engine" . Having an accurate local search database is essential. As a recovery search is the easiest of all searches for a person to find dissatisfaction. Because they "know" the place, thing, item exists.

The second type of search, a discovery search, is much more difficult. Yet it is just as vital for a successful local search application. In the local search sense, a "discovery search" is when; a person has a need and knows where geographically they want a product or service. But the user doesn't know which business to turn to in order to get that particular need met.

Following is an example illustrating a local type discovery search: A Person wants to find a one-hour dry cleaning service in zip code 60606. This person knows what (one hour dry cleaning) they want, they know where (zip code 60606) they want it. However, they don't know WHO provides that particular service in that zip code. (all dry cleaners do not provide one-hour service)
The person using the local search application is trying to discover the answer to their question.

Answering discovery type local search queries, poses problems for any search application without a complete Local Search Database. This problem again stems from the fact that most businesses still do not have a web presence.

Those businesses and there unique qualities are invisible to a web crawled index. To successfully answer a discovery type local search, an application needs more then just the; name, address, and phone number.

A local search application needs to understand the fabric of a business, identify the particular thing which makes a business unique. A person making a local search query wants context allowing them to understand what each business does to distinguish themselves from other businesses in their same category and same geographic space.

The information needed to understand what is unique about a business range from the simple: hours open and payment types accepted, to the more complex attributes like a businesses specialties and their products carried.

As a local search application, having an understanding that there are two types of local search queries to answer, will help you evaluate the quality and depth of your index or database.

Father of term web 2.0 talks about the value of data in the local search equation which is the vision of what Localeze is trying to do in the local search space

Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML." Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software.

This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?

In the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns. The monopoly on domain name registry initially granted by government fiat to Network Solutions (later purchased by Verisign) was one of the first great moneymakers of the internet. While we've argued that business advantage via controlling software APIs is much more difficult in the age of the internet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects.

Look at the copyright notices at the base of every map served by MapQuest, maps.yahoo.com, maps.msn.com, or maps.google.com, and you'll see the line "Maps copyright NavTeq, TeleAtlas," or with the new satellite imagery services, "Images copyright Digital Globe." These companies made substantial investments in their databases NavTeq has gone so far as to imitate Intel's familiar Intel Inside logo: Cars with navigation systems bear the imprint, "NavTeq Onboard." Data is indeed the Intel Inside of these applications, a sole source component in systems whose software infrastructure is largely open source or otherwise commodified.

The now hotly contested web mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application's core data will eventually undercut its competitive position. MapQuest pioneered the web mapping category in 1995, yet when Yahoo!, and then Microsoft, and most recently Google, decided to enter the market, they were easily able to offer a competing application simply by licensing the same data.
(slightly edited here is the rest of the post)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pu