A couple of weeks ago I, and every other columnist for Search Engine Land was asked to write a local or mobile article for their special series of ‘Local Search Week‘ and ‘Mobile Search Week‘. I had an idea as to what to write, and did the initial investigation, but just didn’t have the time to write anything up, so instead of it being over there, it’s now over here.I decided to take a look at the various mapping systems out there, and see if they really were all created equally. I did a number of direction requests, and compared the results. For most of the searches the directions were fairly similar, with the ‘Whitehouse to Disneyland’ trip providing the biggest differences, with Yahoo taking a northerly route to start, while MSN & Google headed South. However, at the end of the trip, Yahoo & Google went the same way, while MSN went their own route. (The order in the image below is Yahoo, Google, MSN).

So what about timing? Obviously the title of this post gives you an idea of how those results came out. For virtually every trip that I put into all Yahoo, Google, MSN & Mapquest, Yahoo came back with the fastest time to the destination. The only divergence from that pattern was the Whitehouse to Disneyland trip, where MSN beat Yahoo into second place. N.B. MSN could not find a route from Anchorage, AK to Miami, FL.

So, if you’re going to travel from Anchorage to Miami, Yahoo will save you 4 hours over mapquest (while traveling only 67 fewer miles), even traveling from Scotland to the South of England will save you 2 hours over Google maps, despite traveling 2 more miles…

The clock struck thirteen…

No, I’m not saying that MSN is watching everything that you do, I’m referring to the part of the book where they happily announce that the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams, despite it previously being 30 grams. A week or so ago I received an email from MSN letting me know how excited they were to let me know that I’d been selected to participate in their new beta program, where all of my ads would now automatically be displayed on their content network. How sweet of them to be excited for me, I felt special… but wait a minute, what if I didn’t want to be on their content network? Well, there’s a way to opt out they say. So here’s the way to opt out. Go to your account, click on a campaign, click on an ad group. Then look for the text to “Select ad distribution”.

Clicking on the actual text expands your options.

…and after a few seconds there it is. All you then have to do is hit save, and wait for the save dialog to pop up. Then repeat for each of the other 500 ad groups that you have live in their system. Or alternatively you can do as we did, and email MSN support, giving them your account details, and they’ll take care of it for you in 2-3 days (fingers crossed).

So having had an account migrate to the new MSN adCenter Beta, I decided to take a look at what they’d improved. After my last post on their geo-targeting solution I’d hoped that they’d made improvements, then again it couldn’t get much worse unless they’d decided to only display lat & long co-ordinates and have you guess on the city names. So how have they improved it? Have they leap-frogged the competition, or at least pulled level with the best solution - Yahoo Panama? Nope, but they have at least pulled level with the Google solution. They now group the cities by state, sounds simple, but it obviously wasn’t as they’ve taken this long to actually implement it.

So why do I like the Yahoo solution better? Is it just because it’s got pretty pictures? Heck, yes. When I’m geotargeting a location that I’m not familiar with, I want to be damn sure that I’m hitting my target markets. With Yahoo, you pick the DMA and you get the instant gratification of seeing the area of the market on the image shade in. With this MSN solution, despite me working and living in the area, I have no idea what the heck the difference is between selecting Alexandria and Arlington… which one covers Fairfax? Vienna? Manassas? You can’t tell. Come on Google & MSN, get with the program and steal borrow from Yahoo.

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…