Local Internet Search - The pages don’t get it YET!

Posted on | November 16, 2007 |

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Many blogs are written talking about more and more features being offered by the online pages - as I call them - SuperPages, YellowPages, etc… Like this fine blog today

They can offer all the features they want but I contend they are still missing the boat - by a mile. Most of the databases are so incomplete that they render the results lacking and thus not giving me what I want - sooooooooooo I don’t go back.

Another issue is that they might have what I need but they ask me so many questions before giving me what I want. I wanted the phone number of a lawyer in town so instead of trying to guess their URL I decided to go to the yellowpages on Yahoo. Here is the sequence:

I put in the zipcode - if I know it.
I put in lawyers
I need to narrow it down between:
1. Law Firms
2. Taxes
I believe law firms so I click on that
I get a list
1. I am not really sure but I guess corporate
Finally I get the list I am looking for and after scrolling past the ones who have paid I find the one I am looking for - they have been in town for over 25 years. Will I go through that exercise again or will I just put his name into Google?

There has got to be a better way and it is not just the features.

Comments

3 Responses to “Local Internet Search - The pages don’t get it YET!”

Chris Silver Smith
November 19th, 2007 @ 12:40 pm

Rick, of course you’re right!

A solid database of business listings is table stakes for both IYPs and Local Search sites.

As a consumer, it’s frustrating to me, too, when I go to any of these sites and cannot locate the info I’m trying to find. This is something none of us have solved yet, and I find the same issues with Google Maps, too.

Listing Quality is a surprisingly complex issue, which is why not a single IYP or Local Search Engine out there has solved it yet. None of the data aggregators have perfect databases. (InfoUSA has really great methods for culling/updating info - by having humans call each and every number once per year - but they’re pretty restricted in what you can do with their data and pretty pricey, too. Even they don’t have perfect data, though.)

It’s hard to get new businesses into the databases sometimes, and it’s even harder to get stale info out.

In any case, once you get past the foundational listing data which everyone has, how do you differentiate beyond that? I think that’s the question that everyone is working upon. Every single one of these companies likely has ongoing projects to continuously improve data quality, so there’s no reason for them to all sit around on their hands ignoring the other end of the equation — how to differentiate and stay competitive.
Bob Gertz
November 20th, 2007 @ 2:01 pm

I’ve just about given up on local search….it’s easier on Google (not Maps, regular) and I continue to get decent results the more specific I make it. This is why people need to consider localizing the SEO information on their sites.
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