While real-time search gets all the attention these days, there’s also increased interest in hyperlocal search. Where real-time search answers What’s happening right now?, hyperlocal search answers the question, What’s happening right here? It’s like local search on steroids, you could say.

Outside.in has, for several years, been somewhat like a clearinghouse of hyperlocal information and services — collecting and publishing local news feeds, and providing tools for local bloggers, for example.

With its recent relaunch, Outside.in has placed itself squarely in the realm of hyperlocal search engine. Aside from a new design, Outside.in made three fairly significant upgrades that impact hyperlocal search and discovery:

• you can search by city, ZIP, neighborhood, address, and place from a single search box
• you can do a keyword search within any of those same geographic options
• you can get RSS feeds for any search you conduct and any page on the site

The ability to search by place and keyword (see first two bullet items above) makes for a convenient option that’s similar to the “search nearby” option that Google Maps and others provide. But unlike maps, with Outside.in you can search for local news and information.

The limiting factor in all this is, of course, the amount of hyperlocal content available. There’s not much in my smallish hometown, so Outside.in tends to surface content from our local paper and TV stations, as well as the local blogs that my wife and I run. But in larger cities with more active hyperlocal publishing, this new emphasis on hyperlocal search might offer a compelling answer to the question, What’s happening right here?

There seems to be an explosion of “real-time” search engines on the PC. The space is very new, still fairly open and in my opinion the tools and sites are not yet all that useful. Almost exactly the same can be said of “augmented reality” (AR) in mobile.

From almost nothing about six months ago, there’s now an explosion of AR apps for Android and the iPhone. They’re cool, they’re novel but most of them are not that useful as a practical matter.

As I wrote previously, AR is a form of search. However the best AR apps incorporate more conventional methods of searching and discovery that don’t rely on the camera or use AR to complement their existing app (i.e., Yelp, Urbanspoon).

Indeed, Urbanspoon (now part of Citysearch/IAC) just released an app update that includes AR for the iPhone 3GS. Called “Scope” it shows a tab at the bottom of the screen that launches the camera-based experience. Hold the phone up and through the camera you see the popularity of restaurants and distance, indicated by the size of the circle (image below). If you point the phone toward the ground, you’ll get a traditional map instead. You can also manually locate yourself for greater precision (so that you can see the restaurants immediately near you) if GPS isn’t working well.

The iPhone (following Android) also recently saw the arrival of AR “browsers” Wikitude and Layar, which incorporate lots of third party data and services. And there’s also new AR “platform” WhereMark for the iPhone.

There are now at least a dozen apps that offer varying degrees of augmented reality through the camera lens. These tools generally work well as a way to discover information about locations immediately around you or to quickly learn more about a place or object immediately in front of you. However AR can be quite awkward in many instances and, at least at this point, is not an all-purpose substitute for more “traditional” mobile search.

In time AR will find its place — and it will — in the mobile universe. Like voice interfaces AR is a search and discovery tool that is uniquely tailored to the mobile handset and not simply imported from the PC. But interestingly, we’re also starting to see AR make its way onto the PC experience in some ways (in Google Maps for example).

If Bing can brand itself “decision engine” as a strategy to differentiate  from the leading “search engine” so can shopping comparison site TheFind. The latter is now calling itself a “buying engine” as a way to emerge from the anonymous sea of shopping search sites out there.

This morning a redesigned TheFind went live with a range of new features, including enhanced product search, coupon aggregation for 50 million products, review search, local inventory and beefed up information about online stores. Beyond a somewhat new look and feel, review search and coupon aggregation are the truly new content areas for the site, which claims to have indexed more than 350 million products from over 500,000 stores through crawling.

TheFind’s CEO Siva Kumar told me that the new site and content is aimed at fulfilling consumer needs at every stage of the buying cycle from research to where to purchase locally. (Local data are from Krillion and NearbyNow.) Among other capabilities, the new capacity to search and filter by coupons, sales or free shipping should prove to be very popular with consumers. (Ask not long ago launched coupon and deal search to capitalize on the hot coupons trend.)

Kumar emphasized the company’s consumer orientation and focus. He added that because of this consumer focus the site is right now under-monetizing vs. its potential, in marked contrast to the bulk of “shopping engines” that have become largely advertising vehicles for e-commerce merchants or search arbitrage sites.

Beyond major branded retailers such as Target, BestBuy and so on, there are only a couple of true shopping “destinations” online, Amazon being one of them. A relatively new generation of shopping sites, such as TheFind or Wize, are trying to move beyond the me-too shopping experience of most comparison engines and appeal to consumers with content, comprehensiveness or features that make them top-of-mind destinations — rather than “one-off” visits through SEM or SEO links in Google. Meanwhile Bing has staked out shopping search as one of its four “strategic verticals.”

TheFind says that it now has 13.5 monthly unique visitors in the US and counting. Beyond the new site, TheFind has for some time had a nicely done iPhone app:

This mobile-PC shopping connection will grow more important over time as consumers with internet-capable handsets bounce back and forth between online and local stores, comparing prices, reviews and local inventory data online and in mobile.

Online comparison shopping is a relatively mature “vertical” but it’s ripe for (I won’t say “disruption”) change and evolution, especially as mobile becomes a more significant part of the experience for consumers.

Consumers care about online reviews; small businesses (SMBs) care about what’s being said about them online. Most small businesses that are aware of the phenomenon of online reviews (and care) try to monitor those reviews by using a search engine or alerts with their business name. They also visit specific sites like Yelp or Citysearch to see what’s being said about them. It’s an awkward process that is time consuming, but increasingly necessary.

Large corporations have had various “buzz tracking” tools at their disposal to monitor “brand chatter” but these have not been available for SMBs. Marchex has now created a comprehensive reputation management tool aimed at the SMB market that enables monitoring of virtually everything being said about them online via a single dashboard. I’ve seen the demo and it’s a very impressive offering. The search tie-in is that the tool is built on top of Marchex’s OpenList search and reviews aggregation technology. During the beta period SMBs can get direct access but after that it will apparently only be available through Marchex’s partners (e.g., YellowPages.com) and not directly to SMBs. I think that’s unfortunate because it’s a valuable tool and service that SMBs would directly pay for.

The press release summarizes the content and data being collected:

Marchex Reputation Management was built using proprietary local search technology from Marchex’s Open List local search network. Covering more than 8,000 sources and currently containing more than a quarter billion pieces of meta-data, Marchex Reputation Management monitors and reports on a specific business’ online footprint, including its user reviews and news, blog and social media mentions. In addition, Marchex Reputation Management ensures the accuracy of information in existing online business listings found on general search sites, local search sites and directories, such as consistent business name, address and phone numbers, as well as making recommendations as to where to add new listings for more coverage. This information is refreshed daily.

Marchex Reputation Management blends Marchex’s heritage in local search with its proven ability to partner and deliver local advertising solutions. Specific features include:

• Reviews: Charts break out the percentage of positive, neutral or negative reviews in an easy-to-read display.
• Mentions: Charts demonstrate activity by reviews or mentions to tie the information back to particular changes in the business or marketing efforts by month.
• Business listings: Ensure business listings are accurate and visible on top online consumer destinations.
• Keyword identification: Top keywords and phrases are highlighted to identify the terms that differentiate the business and act as an alert to any customer service issues.
• Competitive marketing analysis: Compare a business to other local businesses to analyze how its reputation and marketing efforts stack up.
• Ability to engage: Share positive news and reviews with customers and employees through email, Twitter, Facebook, Digg or other sources.

The tool can be used to determine where business listings exist online and how consistent and complete they are; but it’s most valuable, as the name suggests, to track reviews and what’s said about a business. SMBs can also compare themselves to others and direct competitors. And there’s the ability to share reviews via Twitter, Facebook, etc, which takes this beyond simply a monitoring tool into the realm of outbound marketing:

I spoke with Marchex EVP of Product Engineering Matthew Berk, whose OpenList was acquired by Marchex in 2006 and is the basis of this tool, and he said that SMBs in the beta test are figuring out that they can use this not only for monitoring of reviews but also to glean information for later marketing purposes. It has long been the case that proactive SMBs have used online reviews to improve their service or identify problems but there hasn’t been an easy way for them to get all the relevant information in a single tool or dashboard.

GetListed does a good job of helping businesses identify where they show up online and provides a number of services for SEO purposes. But in terms of monitoring online ratings and reviews of local businesses and building a suite of services around that, there isn’t anything else in the market (to my knowledge) that does this.

It’s time for another in our occasional series of search tool roundups, but this one is more focused than previous articles: Rather than look at a variety of random search tools, I’ll introduce you to a handful of Twitter search tools that may have flown under your radar until now. You’ll learn how to search the bios of other Twitter users, how to search deeper into Twitter’s archives, and how to find jobs advertised on Twitter. But first, an interesting Twitter search tool with potentially serious local search implications.

Schmap: Trending Restaurants & Bars

The Schmap Picks: Trending Restaurants & Bars search tool lets you see the collected tweets about restaurants and bars in 13 cities around the world. For any of the 13 cities, you can browse by category (pizza/burgers, seafood/sushi, etc.) and even by district/neighborhood. Here’s a screenshot showing trending eateries in the downtown Seattle area:

For each establishment, you can click to see all of the tweets (”opinions”) in the Schmap system, which effectively creates a Twitter landing page for local restaurants and bars. Here’s the opinion page for one restaurant:

It makes for an interesting slice of opinion about local restaurants, complete with address and location plotted on a map — sort of a Twitter-based version of Yelp or Citysearch, though I’m assuming not as comprehensive as those well-established local directories. The pages are crawlable and have very SEO-friendly URLS, so it’s not hard to imagine these pages eventually ranking for some restaurants.

Areaface

Areaface is one of several tools that lets you search for Twitter users in a specific city or town. When you visit the site, just click anywhere on the map and Areaface will load recent tweets from that location. But there’s a twist: If you want, you can further narrow the results by keyword. This screenshot shows people in the Dallas area tweeting about U2 (the band plays a concert there tonight).

You can see each person’s tweet by putting your mouse over their avatar. The results are fairly up-to-date, too: The most recent tweet captured in the search above was published within an hour of my search.

TwitterJobSearch.com

A site that does exactly what its name implies: let’s you search jobs that have been advertised via Twitter. TwitterJobSearch.com says it gets around the 140-character limitation by using natural language tools to process tweets, then crawls pages that have been linked and associates the job listing data it finds back to the original tweet.

Search results can be sorted by date or relevance, and there are several filters including the date of the job posting, the job title, job type, salary, location, and more. A cool beta feature plots the job-related tweets on a map.

Searchtastic

Searchtastic is a new Twitter search engine that, unlike Twitter’s own search, can search quite a ways back into “historical” tweets — further into the archives, in other words. Searchtastic is limited by the Twitter API, though, and readily admits that it can’t index all tweets. Although it’s not necessary, the site suggests that you’ll get better search results when you specify a username. Here’s a screenshot showing tweets indexed (and returned) from as far back as mid-July:

A unique feature is that any word on the search results can be clicked to add it to your search query.

TweepSearch

If you’re looking to connect with like-minded Twitter users, doing a basic keyword search on recent tweets may not produce the kind of results you want. Search for “seahawks,” for example, and you’re going to find people in Jacksonville tweeting about the way their team was demolished Sunday by the Seattle Seahawks. TweepSearch skips the content of tweets and instead searches the bios of Twitter users. So, a search for “seahawks” produces much better results:

You can sort the results by screen name, or by the number of followers/friends each user has.

See also:

• Five More Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Coming out of (private) and into public Beta today is a new hybrid travel and local search engine, Goby.com (GO-be), a new entrant into the foray of “deep web” search technology, led by a founding team with web and search experience from Endeca (CEO Mark Watkins), Lycos (Jim Fell) and Reprise Media (CTO Vince Russo), MIT (professor Michael Stonebraker, co-founder) as well as travel distribution experience with John Walsh (World Travel Holdings.) The start-up received its funding from Flybridge Capital and Kepha Partners.

Using a 3-box format for search queries, Goby’s intention is to help guide the user through task-centric discovery to answer queries relevant to “things to do nearby”, whether that location is a vacation destination or your local city area.

Throughout its (private) beta phase, Goby.com identified up to 250 categories of content surrounding popular themes and search queries that fall into these three categories of understood concepts. In addition to queries on things to do, outdoor recreation and activities, dining, entertainment, live music, museums, historic sites are top suggestions, as well as more travel specific concepts, such as hotels and lodging topics.

Currently using about 500 pre-qualified, authoritative data sources (or “deep web” databases) or known local sources such as Yelp.com, Goby contextualizes and organizes these results in a clean format, using Google Maps and images (also from Flickr) to enhance results.

Interestingly, Goby appears to cover a broad range of (and even some obscure) locations across the USA, as opposed to a beta launch with limited destinations. If you live in a large city like San Francisco, you can browse for things to do on a foggy day, or if are looking for a weekend getaway in a small coastal town for a food and wine festival, you might give Goby a try. Although some users may initially be disappointed to see a limited number of results to any query (very few test searches return more than 100 listings), it may not matter if the first ten to twenty are the most relevant and useful results.  An iPhone app is currently in development.

Startup RedBeacon, a self-described “Open Table for service businesses,” has won TechCrunch 50’s top prize and $50,000. I wasn’t at TC50 but I watched the demo pitch on video. RedBeacon is the just the latest startup to take aim at the massive local services segment. The demo was elegant and the theory behind the site makes lots of sense.

There’s just one fairly major problem: execution in the real world.

One can imagine the VC meetings and the pitch: “No one has yet to create an Open Table for the millions of local service businesses in the $14 billion yellow pages industry.”  In fact there are a number of startups that have come before and have tried or are still trying to do some version of that very thing. They include (but aren’t limited to): BookingAngel, Bookfresh, Genbook, Libersy and a few others.

If we open the aperture a bit wider there are many lead generation sites and tools for local service businesses, ServiceMagic most visibly among them.

I’ve got nothing against RedBeacon and wish them well. But they will find, like many others before them, that the local space is much much harder to crack than it appears from a distance. There are many failed startups in local. In most cases they failed because they didn’t realize how tough it would be to get businesses to advertise or sign up.

There are also those who strongly believe that the telephone is a critical part of any advertising platform for local business, since so much business is connected via the phone on the local level. There is no phone component here. In fact RedBeacon is explicitly avoiding the telephone — “all without making a call” was the phrase mentioned during the pitch.

As a general matter local businesses are time starved, confused about online advertising and generally overwhelmed by pitches for their marketing dollars. Getting them to show up and participate at RedBeacon is going to be an enormous challenge. Let me repeat that: an enormous challenge.

If the founders have a five to seven year time horizon they might be prepared for the very long, slow climb up the mountain that is local. Alternatively they might be secretly thinking they’re a useful platform and will be acquired by a yellow pages publisher or other traditional media company if they can prove value and gain some momentum. Perhaps; it’s more likely than succeeding as a stand alone company.

Somewhat less challenging than getting local businesses to self-serve and participate in RedBeacon is building consumer awareness. Yet that too will be tough, with search engines and so many other sources of local business information online. The booking part is novel and differentiates RedBeacon from many local destination sites. But the third party appointment vendors (e.g., Bookfresh) will enable sites like Yelp to add booking and appointments quite easily. Yelp has 25 million uniques and a consumer brand. Tough to match.

Yet without brand awareness and usage among consumers, those local businesses that are more savvy and motivated will not show up because they’re not likely to get much response. And without a critical mass of local business participation the value won’t be there for consumers either. It’s a classic chicken and egg problem. The fact that RedBeacon won — again, I have nothing against the site or its founders — also reflects to me the disconnect between the bubble world of startups and their funders and the real world.

Good luck to RedBeacon and congratulations. I hope that they prove my skepticism wrong.

A version of local search has existed on Twitter for some time: asking your followers for local recommendations about places to stay, things to do and so on. One can also use Twitter search itself, though it’s very hit and miss in terms of the quality of results. And there are also the third party search engines that use the Twitter API. Yet those typically produce the same uneven results.

But in what is a first (to my knowledge) Idearc’s Superpages has brought true local search to Twitter through Twitter.com/sp411. Twitter users can now conduct searches of the Superpages database and get results as direct messages on  Twitter to their local queries. (They can also retweet and share them, which makes it that much more interesting.)

Here’s the process:

1. You follow sp411 and then it will automatically follow you a few seconds later
2. You then send a direct message to sp411 (”d sp411″) with a query and location. Example: pizza in Seattle, “d sp411 pizza Seattle”.
3. Results will appear in an all the Twitter notification places (email, SMS and direct message).

Here’s what it looks like:

Just a couple of seconds after the direct message is sent you see something like this:

If you click through on any of these links you are taken to a business profile page on Superpages’ site:

After the initial set up process, in which you follow sp411 and it follows you, the service proves to be quite useful especially if you’re looking for a specific business phone number or address. It’s also an example of Superpages proactively taking its data and local search capabilities out to where users are, not unlike what many companies have been doing for some time on Facebook.

And in case it isn’t self evident, this also makes Twitter/sp411 a local-mobile search tool as well.

There are a couple of other Twitter bots out there but this is the first local search tool on Twitter. I would imagine, as people see and start to use this, we’re going to see a bunch of vertical and other search tools employing similar functionality. And as they start to emerge they make Twitter a much more interesting and useful site.

Google Maps has introduced a useful new feature called “What’s Here,” which allows you to use the map as a kind of discovery tool. Select a point, right click and the menu appears with a new choice “what’s here,” allowing discovery of — you guessed it — what’s at/around the designated site or point. The answers and options change depending on the level of zoom. User-generated maps and content appear along with more traditional data sources in the left pane accordingly.

Here’s an example in San Francisco for the Ferry Building:

Clicking the link “explore this area” yields additional content:

It appears to work outside the US as well:

This is obviously not a major upgrade, and in fact What’s Here is somewhat buried behind a right click. But it’s a helpful new feature and adds incrementally to the value of Google Maps, offering people one more reason to keep using it.

Google just completed its now annual local reseller symposium. A terrific event last year, I was unable to attend this year but heard from one attendee that there were many fewer resellers there than a year ago. Print yellow pages, newspapers, webhosting firms, stand-alone local sales channels (e.g., ReachLocal, Yodle) and a range of others comprise the the local reseller category. They’re all selling small businesses (SMBs) into search marketing. Whether a function of the economy or for some other reason, the lowered attendance may be a metaphor for the challenges that “Local SEM” now faces.

In October, 2004 I wrote a report entitled “SEM for SMEs: The Model Has Arrived.” That document proclaimed that a then “guaranteed clicks” product provided by WebVisible to yellow pages partners would enable:

• Large numbers of small businesses to buy search marketing in a simplified way
• Enable yellow pages to become the gateway to online marketing (on search engines) for their advertisers
• Allow Google (et al.) to tap the massive SMB market through third party sales channels, avoiding the need for direct outreach to this elusive advertiser population

In contrast to my happy proclamation in 2004, the road for Local SEM has been rocky. On my blog Screenwerk I’ve been writing for the past couple of years about the high churn rates for these products and other challenges. Here’s a representative excerpt from September, 2008:

[W]e’re now in a kind of “purgatory,” where the “old” methods aren’t working as well (they still work in many instances however) and the “new” methods aren’t delivering as promised. It’s a problem for everyone.

I could go on at length and elaborate. However, Borrell Associates has just released a report (underwritten by Clickable; can be downloaded from their site) that attempts to quantify all this. The Wall Street Journal covers the findings at a high level:

Borrell CEO Gordon Borrell also blames the affiliates that are marking up the search ad prices they charge local advertisers to increase their commissions. Local advertisers aren’t generating enough leads to justify what they are spending, causing them to drop out. Furthermore, the resellers are charging local advertisers based on how many thousands of clicks they can drive to their Web sites. But those clicks are often worthless if they aren’t from the right kinds of customers. “Search advertising has been over-hyped and over-sold to local businesses,” he said.

The key findings of the report surround local advertiser churn, which approaches an astounding 100 percent on an annualized basis for some of the resellers. According to the Borrell document, the firm found:

• 6-10 percent a month attrition on gross customer count
• Up to 50 percent [of SMBs] quit by 90 days
• Up to 90 percent quit within 6 months

Some of the resellers do better and some do worse; all will say they’re better than the average, which is roughly 7 percent per month churn. What’s going on? As traditional media are losing audiences and becoming more expensive for the leads they deliver, search is challenged. Why aren’t local SMBs seeing the same results that many of the marketers who read this blog see? Why are they trying these simplified search marketing products and then abandoning them?

From my understanding and experience it can be attributed to several factors that operate to varying degrees in most cases:

• A lack of education for the SMB and appropriate expectation setting
• Not allowing enough time for the campaign to become optimized
• Media salespeople who are compensated on customer acquisition, not customer retention
• Not enough of the advertiser spend going to the media/search buy (as much as 40 percent may go to overhead/profit, yet that may be necessary)
• In a limited number cases, the advertiser seeking to pick keywords or otherwise dictate or manage its campaign from afar (and not well)

Frustrated by the lack of margin on SEM, many traditional publishers are forming networks and looking for qualified traffic outside of the major search engines. Yellow pages and companies like Citysearch have been aggressive in developing alternative traffic sources. Yodle has developed a “network” of traffic sources and publishers that it works with. ReachLocal recently launched an “exchange” for publishers and advertisers. And we’ll continue to see this movement toward SEM alternatives to diversify traffic sources beyond the major engines.

Yet for consumers search engines remain central to the online experience and critical drivers of leads and calls to local businesses. Thus local SEO grows in importance, especially given Google’s recent moves to show the “10 pack” in cases where there is no geo-modifier. In addition, sites like Facebook and Twitter emerge as potentially important providers of traffic and marketing tools for SMBs.

Borrell in its report chronicles the projected migration of ad spending from traditional media to online. The firm says that an additional $15 billion will migrate from offline to online by 2013. And local search advertising is supposed to be one of the big beneficiaries of that shift. But the problems above complicate such estimates. Some of the SMB ad dollars will simply “disappear” as that migration occurs — turn into spending on items that don’t constitute “advertising” (e.g., new websites, use of free online marketing tools).

There’s a lot more to say but the facile observation that the SMB money starting to leave traditional media will simply transfer to online and search in particular belies a much more complex reality.