Search Engine Tigers

Since I have friend in from Wales for a couple of weeks, one of the stops on the sightseeing tour is 2-1/2 hours down the road in Colonial Williamsburg. Given that they mistakenly trust me, I’m planning on introducing them to that American institution know as – The Waffle House.

But, while I knew that there was one near the start of my trip, I wanted to know if there was one a little further along, but how to find out? Well, the first (and last) stop was at their corporate site. I was expecting the usual ’store locater’, and that I’d have to find a zip code or two for the trip, or better yet, have a radius option and expand that out to where I figured would be a good point to sort out breakfast. No, The Waffle House exceeded my expectations. They actually have a trip planner, powered by where2getit, that allows you to enter the starting and ending location as per any mapquest like system, and get directions. These directions were then heavily sprinkled with every possible Waffle House on the trip, so I can look and see if we decide to go a little further, that we’ll have x miles before our next potential breakfast location. This is a great way for a company with multiple locations frequented by travelers to utilize said multiple locations as a great benefit. Nicely done Waffle House… see you in the morning.

This week there’s been a lot of talk about Topix.net purchasing the domain topix.com for $1 million in order for them to have the ‘proper’ url, and for them to grab the traffic that they were missing as people, real or imagined, automatically type .com for every url. People have discussed this backwards and forwards, talking about whether this was a good deal, or a bad deal, whether they should have kept the .net as their main domain and redirected the .com over there, or whether we should all just wait a month and see if everything sorts itself out (the crux is that since the shift to the .com domain, they’ve had a drop in traffic / rankings). But this wasn’t the only big domain purchasing story this week…

One blog reported on Tate & Lyle, and Johnson & Johnson, the co-developers of the artificial sweetner Splenda, purchasing 200-300 negative domain names, such as the lovely splendaisnotsafe.com, the divine victimsofsplenda.info, and the succinct splendapoison.org. It’s not a bad idea to attempt to control the story by taking domains off the shelf, but if they really expect that someone would purchase splendatoxicitycenter.com, then I’ve got to really wonder whether they know something about Splenda that we all should know…

So what’s the commonality here? Well, both companies have gone out and purchased domains that they think should be under their control in order for them to succeed in business. The lesson is that while you can you should get as many permutations of, at least, your company name as you can, and if there’s a chance that one of your products may have a particular defect that you’re aware of, maybe you should look into controlling that story by buying those domains too. Maybe another lesson is that you should stick with real sugar…

I’m not going to be able to go to Search Engine Strategies – New York 2007, but for those that have been on the fence, Google Analytics pushed out a 20% off coupon on Wednesday for the show, and if you register before March 23rd you get that 20% off the early bird special price, so it’s a great deal.

Thanks to Anthony for noticing this.

After my last post on local.live misplacing my local supermarket, I noticed that local.live has a “Locate me” feature where you can either install their location finder software, which uses wi-fi to pinpoint your location, or you can use the old fashioned IP detection service that looks at the ip assigned to your machine and attempts to find your location based on that. Now they do give the disclaimer that IP based location detection is not an exact science, as the IP assigned to your machine may not really show as coming out of your location (I believe the IP address for the Hilton in Chicago was resolving to somewhere in Florida when I was there in December). So just to make sure where my IP resolved to I did a search, and found an online service that returned the information on my IP address. It got me right on the nose.

So it was time to see if local.live agreed. I clicked on the IP location detection button and… was returned a map of Delaware.

I guess that at least they got the right coast…

I’ve hardly used Microsoft’s local live service, so I thought it was time that I gave it a go, and what better initial test to use than to enter the address of my local supermarket? It was built just over a year ago, so it’s a fairly good test to see how up to date the local engines are.

No results found, try it with a space?

Ok, now what? Hmm, no results found, am I looking for the location for Safe Ways?

Well, apparently it’s located in another state

Maybe it’s in there if I just search for the singular Safeway?

Nope, but it wants to know if I’m looking for the location of safeway, let’s say yes and click there.

Ok great, according to local.live my local Safeway is located in French Guiana. So it looks like I’ll have to switch to Giant, or that new Harris Teeter they’re building down the road.

Yes, I know that the last search that is being done is a location match search, despite the term being in the business name field. Either MSN needs to expand their dataset to include one of the larger grocery chains in the US, or they need to refine their search algorithm to not look for data entered in the business name field as a misspelling of a town name in South America or India… I have to say based on this that I’m not terribly impressed with local.live, although the results are mildly amusing, and if you ever wanted to know the place in the world that has the closest name to your company you now have a tool that will do that…

Playing with different add-ons for firefox I came across a local search add-on called LookLOCAL. Once installed your firefox browser grows yet another toolbar. This one allows you to either search for a business / business category in a particular location, or to get directions from one point to another. The results for the search show up in a new tab, and you see that they use Microsoft’s Live search and maps. However, looking at the top of the screen there are radio buttons to switch to Google Maps and Yahoo local. Flicking those radio buttons changes the map to the one selected, but the results stay the same (this is a great way to compare the mapping services provided by the big 3). Returning to the search area and clicking on the search button performs the search on whichever of the 3 radio buttons is selected, which makes this a fantastic tool for comparing local results between the big 3.

Other interesting features? Well, besides the A to B driving directions (which again use whichever of the engines that’s selected), there’s a traffic conditions tab that shows you alerts and cameras, and then the misfit – there’s an explore vacation spots tab, which lists the top 25 adventure vacation spots in the world, or the top 10 beaches in the world, etc. Nice to know, but it’s hardly local, if I’m looking at traffic conditions in DC, then decide I want to hit the beach, is Ipanema really the best local option for me? Not really, but it does sound good.

Now you’ve got your business listed correctly in Google Maps, it’s time to turn your attention to Yahoo Local.

Simply go to the home page – local.yahoo.com - and enter in your business information. It it’s there you’ll get a list of results starting with any sponsored listings, then any local listings, then a list of web search results, containing the business name that are ‘near your location’. If the business in the local listing is yours, click on the name for the detailed listing. This gives you hours of operations, any user reviews from insiderpages.com or Yahoo, payment methods, specialties, brands, etc.



If you want you can then edit the listing, changing / adding data as necessary. This data change request is then reviewed by an editor before it’s accepted. You can also claim your listing, providing Yahoo with your contact information, which will then set you up as the trusted contact for this listing, and you can set up some extra features, such as refusing to display your address (useful for a service oriented business), or having Yahoo periodically send you reviews that are written about your business – useful to give you a warm glow, or to let you know when you need to start damage control. Similar to Google Maps, when you add or claim your listing you have the chance to select categories that relate to your business

Google is the undisputed king of search, but when it gets to the explicit topic of local search there’s currently not a champion, but Google is up there. So how do you get your business listed in Google’s local search solution – Google Maps?

Firstly go to the Google Local Business Center and enter in the information for your business to see if it’s there.



If there is a match/matches, the next screen will offer you a choice to select an existing listing, or to add a new listing. If you select an existing listing you get a map, and the choice to either edit the existing listing, or suspend it. So what’s to stop your competitor from editing your listing and changing your phone number to theirs to steal your online customers? Google has 2 ways that they use to resolve this issue upon receiving a request to edit or suspend the listing. The first is to send a letter with a pin and activation instructions to the address on the listing. The second is only available if the listing is one that is listed with ‘information providers’, which means that the data has been sent to Google from their data partners such as SuperPages. The second method is a phone call to the number on the listing. Putting that aside for now, what information is Google looking for you to enter? Besides the expected address and phone number information you can also enter hours of operation, payment methods, web address, and several other items, as seen below.



The next step is to select the category / categories that your business falls in. Why does this matter? Well, this is used in two ways. Firstly for searches that directly match that category, and secondly for searches that match synonyms for that category i.e. flowers for florists.

Following that you are given the ability to add custom attributes. If there’s something special about your business, then here’s the place to put it – i.e. certifications, bonding, specialty brands, etc.

Next you can upload up to 10 images of your business, products, services, etc. Following that you just have to review the information and wait for the call/postcard, and once you’ve verified your information, your listing will start show up in the google maps results. If you have multiple locations, then you can use a different process through Google Base, which allows you to batch process your listings, but that’s a different topic for a different time.

Ask has added new functionality to their local maps. After performing a search on city.ask.com there’s now a new drawing tool that allows you to draw borders, shapes, or text on a map. You can save the maps and even email a link to a marked up map.

i.e. Joe’s Pizza delivery area

or Area 51?

How useful is this feature? Well, the company that I work for is split over multiple locations, and just today we had a cust care rep in Albany try to tell us exactly where a business was located “find the intersection of these highways, then go west until you see a horseshoe road, it’s near there”. Having them go to this mapping function and just email it right to us would have simplified the whole process. But what about a regular user? Well, the cool feature that they’ve implemented to go along with this, is that you can search within the shape that you’ve drawn. So say you’re in a hotel in Chicago for a conference, and want to know what your options are for pizza within a 4 block radius, simply draw it on the map, and search within the boundaries.

Nice, thanks ASK.

Piper Jaffrey recently put out a comprehensive paper on many things search and internet related entitled “The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium“. This 425 page report covers a wide variety of topics, but I’m going to concentrate here on those related to local search, and IYP.

Firstly the basics, 70% of Americans are now using the internet, with usage growing 18% per annum. The internet is now the second leading medium at home, behind TV, and is easily the leading medium at work. 82% of users are over 18, and they spend 88% of the total online minutes.

How pervasive is local search? Well, in response to how often users used different services, email came in at 100%, local search actually came in 2nd at 57.6%, ahead of Instant Messaging, online purchases, music downloads, blog reading / publishing, social networking, and the rest. Quite an amazing number really if it’s accurate, but does that mean that there isn’t that much room for growth? If the potential usage increase that can be had is slightly less than double, then is the market fairly saturated? Not by long shot, unlike a service such as IM, there is a large offline equivalent to local search, that can be migrated online and monetized (once a winning monetization strategy has been arrived at). So what do they consider to be the potential market for local search? Well, they have the current total local ad market (local search, IYP, and classifieds) at $4.489 billion dollars, which makes it 12% of the current offline spend of $37 billion. In their opinion online dollars in this area has the potential to reach 70% of offline spend, so the total potential that they show stands at around 2.59 bilion dollars. This shows that there’s clearly a lot of room for growth in this sector. Of course the next question is that of canibalization. Many offline publishers expressed concerns that moving online would chip away at their core offline business. According to this graphic, that isn’t happening. Instead the IYPs are expanding the overall market, without negatively affecting the print market which has remained fairly static.

So who are the top players in local search? Well, this paper has the answer to that too (and unfortunately none of the sites I work with are listed here… yet…). The interesting thing in this graphic is how far ahead of the rest Mapquest still is. When people talk about local search it tends to be forgotten, but it’s the clear leader right now. Idearc’s Superpages.com occupies third place, but they’ve been expanding their reach through deals with Google Maps, and more recently local.com.



What about different monetization methods for local? What does the report have to say about that?

The pay-per-call feature also offers a more familiar way for some local businesses to pay for search listings. We believe call-based interaction and tracking could ultimately account for 30%-50% of total local search listings.

Well, that’s good news for the company that I work for, given our current business model.

Now for the part of the report that I don’t agree with. They show a table that displays the effect of localization on search keyword process. In virtually every case, they show the price for the general nationwide term being less than that of the ‘local term’ version of the same keyword. They don’t define exactly what this means. This could be a national campaign that used “Chicago Dentist”, a campaign targeted to Chicago that targets “Dentist”, or a campaign targeted to Chicago that targets “Chicago Dentist”. To make the claim that this shows that localization is going to drive more revenue for the search engines because of this actually contradicts a statement made on the same page that the longer the tail of the search term, the lower the CPC. Surely “Chicago Dentist” is a longer tail phrase than “Dentist”? Plus, I can guarantee that once you get out of the top MSA’s, the CPC is going to be less than that for the ‘general term’, so to make a blanket statement based on data for 5 of the top MSA’s is misleading.

The data for the above was provided by Yahoo Search Marketing on January 26th, 2007, which means that it wasn’t too long before it was invalid, as one week later YSM implemented quality scores on their Panama engine, which changed the pricing scale on their system from a straight auction style to the Google-like system. Also if the data is to be believed, there’s a fantastic opportunity in that the top position for one of the most searched on terms on the internet for the last few years, as well as that for one of the most searched on terms so far this year, can apparently be purchased exceedingly cheaply…

(thanks to Greg Sterling for pointing the Piper Jaffrey paper out).