Search Engine Land » Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

Foursquare Brings More Search Refinements To Mobile Apps

Greg Sterling — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:16:14 +0000

Calling it “personalized search for the real world,” Foursquare brought its mobile Explore functionality into its recently redesigned PC website roughly three weeks ago, and added some new search capabilities in the process. Those capabilities included the ability to filter places results by four categories: 1) “I haven’t been to yet” 2) “I have been to before” 3) “My friends have been to” 4) “Have Foursquare specials.”

The mobile-PC cross-pollination continued yesterday as Foursquare brought some of those enhanced search capabilities back to its iPhone and Android mobile apps. Now you can filter mobile search results by places “I’ve been,” “new to me” or places “my friends have been.”

In addition Foursquare made it easier to set or change your location. You can now drag, pinch, double tap and zoom the map and find places within the desired neighborhood or city more quickly and easily.

The release notes also indicate that the company has introduced “improved handling of duplicate venues” and restaurant “menus and hours.”

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Foursquare Launches “Personalized Search For The Real World”

Greg Sterling — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:42:56 +0000

Foursquare is introducing what it calls “personalized search for the real world” on its recently redesigned website. What that means as a practical matter is the introduction of the “Explore” feature, better keyword search and several new filters that enable users to drill down in search results. We can now, without hesitation, now call Foursquare a “local search engine.”

You’ll now see an Explore button or tab in the upper right on the website. It’s obviously been on the mobile app for some time but not on the site until today. Because I was so used to seeing Explore on the mobile client I didn’t remember it wasn’t previously available on the website until Foursquare pointed that fact out.

Users can now search on categories or business names. You can also browse categories.

Where Foursquare’s new search capability shines, however, is on highly specific queries. Foursquare told me that all the “Tips” content is now searchable, so obscure or very specific information can be discovered in results.

Below is the result of a (not so obscure) search for “fish tacos” in New York. I get to see the full set of results from Foursquare users who’ve talked about places with fish tacos.

Yet I can also drill down on these places with four filters:

“I haven’t been to yet”
“I have been to before”
“My friends have been to”
“Have Foursquare specials”

The filters enable users to see only those results that, for example, have Foursquare specials or where my Foursquare contacts have gone before. The value and benefits of these filters are self-evident. Foursquare said it may add other filters over time after it sees how users interact with these.

The existence of the new Explore filters and features will engage users and reward them for greater participation. Where badges created an incentive system for some people to use Foursquare in the past, these search-related tools offer a new set of practical incentives for people to use Foursquare and benefit from increased participation.

As I’ve said in the past, I’m very impressed by the way that Foursquare has evolved and transformed itself from a geeky “game” into a much more mainstream product — and now local search utility.

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Yelping In The Beemer: Review Site Inks Deal With BMW

Greg Sterling — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:48:04 +0000

Yelp is now established and mainstream enough to be included in BMW’s Online/in-car content. Yelp reviews and related content will shortly be available to BMW owners “who subscribe to the optional BMW Assist Convenience Plan and have a navigation-equipped vehicle capable of receiving the BMW Online service.”

This means select BMW vehicles (see below for list) and is available in the US only for now. However Yelp’s international coverage makes it probable that the partnership will roll out more broadly if it proves successful in the US.

Yelp offered some screens of the BMW in-car search on its blog:

Select models that can access the Yelp content include the following:

2009 and later Z4, 1, 3 and 7 Series
2010 and later 5 and 6 Series
2010 and later X5 and X6
2011 and later X3

Google, Bing and Mapquest have mapping and local search deals with various car makers. Ford has also invested in making its Sync in-dash navigation and content system compatible with numerous smartphones. This is the direction that we’ll see more and more carmakers go: integration of smartphone apps into in-dash content systems.

The Yelp-BMW announcement is a high-profile deal that may boost confidence in its forthcoming IPO among some investors. The company is seeking to raise as much as $100 million through a public offering that will likely happen in Q1 of next year.

Yelp previously reported that 40 percent of its query volume is now coming from mobile devices. Add BMW to the list.

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Search Trumps Social For Local Business Information

Greg Sterling — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:59:38 +0000

The internet and search engines in particular are the top sources for information about local businesses, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Foundation. That’s not really a surprise. But what’s interesting perhaps is how many people rely on print newspapers and how few seem to rely on social media for local information, according to the survey data.

Pew surveyed just over 1,000 US adults by telephone in January, 2011. What it found was that 55 percent of people “say they get news and information about local restaurants, bars, and clubs” and 60 percent “say they get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars” (presumably everything else). Here is the list of sources used . . .

Restaurants, Bars & Clubs, Internet Rules

When it comes to finding information about bars, restaurants and clubs, 51 percent use the internet overall, with this breakdown:

search engines – 38 percent
specialty websites – 17 percent (e.g., Yelp, though that was not specifically identified)
social media – 3 percent (social networks and Twitter)

As for offline media, the breakdown is this way:

31 percent use newspapers (print [26 percent], online [5 percent])
23 percent word of mouth
8 percent rely upon local TV (traditional, online)

Internet Tops For Local Businesses, Too

When it comes to seeking information about other types of local businesses, 47 percent use the internet, with the breakdown this way:

search engines – 36 percent
specialty websites – 16 percent
social media – 1 percent

As for offline media, the breakdown is this way:

30 percent use newspapers (print [29 percent], online [2 percent])
22 percent word of mouth
8 percent rely upon local TV (traditional, online)
5 percent rely upon local radio

Multiple Sources Used

Pew also found people used roughly 14 different kinds of sources to get local information. A large percentage used or “relied upon” multiple sources. In addition, 47 percent of respondents said they got “local news and information” on their mobile phones.

Very strangely, online yellow pages or “local directory sites” were not among the choices given to survey respondents.

The finding that so few people use social media for local recommendations is somewhat surprising (given that it has been likened to “online word of mouth”). It shows that Facebook and Twitter have quite a distance to go to become useful local business discovery tools.

Foursquare Hires Sr. Google Engineer For Search-Related Efforts

Greg Sterling — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:47:08 +0000

Foursquare has hired Andrew Hogue to beef up the company’s search and search-related initiatives and capabilities. Hogue was a senior engineer with Google from 2004 through November of this year.

The company recently announced it had passed 15 million users globally, 50 percent of which are outside the US.

We spoke to Hogue about a range of topics last week from New York, where Foursquare is headquartered and he will be based. Hogue brings some serious engineering chops to Foursquare and it’s a coup for the company to get him.

Hogue told us that he was eager to work on improving Foursquare’s discovery and recommendations capabilities using all the data Foursquare is collecting from users.

The company just redesigned its PC site to make it much more useful and a true companion to the mobile app. Last week Foursquare also launched a couple of new tools for third party publishers and developers, including a “save to Foursquare” button that connects online content to the physical world.

If you’ve saved a restaurant review to your Foursquare account, for example, and later you’re near the restaurant in the real world (and have Radar enabled) you’ll get a notification that the place is in your To-Do List. That “online to offline” functionality is pretty compelling and unique among social networks.

The graphic below illustrates Foursquare’s rapid, “hockey stick”-like growth in just under two years, from roughly half a million users in February 2010 to 15 million today. Foursquare was launched in March of 2009. The company has raised just over $70 million to date from investors.

The Big Roundup: Finding Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals & Specials

Greg Sterling — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:13:09 +0000

We’re already well into Black Friday. In many US stores the frenzy began last night at 10 pm or midnight (as opposed to the normal 4 am door-busting start time). People barely had time to overcome the sleep-inducing effects of L-tryptophan before getting out into the melee. And the word “melee” aptly describes the scene in a Southern California Wal-Mart store as one woman unleashed pepper spray on her fellow shoppers to prevent them from getting in her way.

Today and for the next few days people will be using a wide range of tools and resources — hopefully not pepper spray — to help them determine what and where to buy to get the best prices on items on their holiday shopping lists. This year there are more tools, sites and mobile apps than ever it would seem. Indeed, there’s just no way to deal with all the online shopping sites and apps comprehensively in one post, but here’s a sample of what’s out there.

Search: where it all starts

Google just this week beefed up its Product Search site with a number of new features and capabilities. Product Search now has more information and is much more “visual” than it used to be (courtesy of the shuttered Boutiques.com). The home page of Google Product Search doesn’t feature any Black Friday specific information but it does promote Google Offers, the useful Google Shopper mobile app and the recently relaunched Google Catalogs for the iPad.

Google Product Search and Google general search results also show information about where you can buy items in stock at nearby stores. This is a nice feature of Google’s product search that isn’t available on Yahoo or Bing.

However if you’re looking for Black Friday information Google Product Search isn’t a great place to start. Yahoo has much more Black Friday content, including a dedicated deals site with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. All same information is also accessible from the main Yahoo Shopping site.

You can browse all the Black Friday ads online in one place on Yahoo, albeit in a somewhat awkward scanned-pdf format. Probably the best place to see all the Black Friday Ads in a browse-able and searchable format is ShopLocal.com. It’s not a great user-experience but it gets the job done. The Black Friday sites also have all or almost all the ads online as well.

Not as good as ShopLocal but better than Yahoo, Bing does good job with formatting and presenting the weekly “circular” retailer information, including Black Friday ads. However the “circular” information is unfortunately quite limited. Luckily there is a dedicated Black Friday-Cyber Monday section in Bing Shopping that also features some editorial picks.

You can, of course, also use Google, Yahoo and Bing to search for “Black Friday Ads” or “Black Friday Deals” sites. There are dozens of them (e.g., BlackFriday2011).

Shopping engines: Amazon, eBay and beyond

Amazon is the most aggressive of the online shopping sites, with loads of Black Friday specials including hourly “lightening deals.” Amazon also has a range of iPad and mobile apps for your cross-platform shopping convenience.

These include Windowshop for the iPad, the Amazon Mobile app and several other mobile apps. For example Amazon Deals allows you to rapidly flip through Amazon’s Gold Box and Lightening Deals on your smartphone. There’s also Amazon Price Check for in-store price comparisons.

Amazon rival eBay is also featuring Black Friday deals and daily deals on its home page. PayPal, which is owned by eBay, also has shopping and deals. However, PayPal mainly uses email to promote shopping to its existing users. There are no Black Friday specific promotions apparently.

There are numerous mobile apps from eBay including RedLaser, a barcode scanning app that offers an expanding array of content and functionality (i.e., pricing, reviews and local inventory data). The local inventory data is from eBay’s Milo.com and is available online (though buried) and through a dedicated Milo mobile app, in addition to RedLaser.

Shopping comparison engine PriceGrabber has a Black Friday-Cyber Monday section. Nextag is also offering some Black Friday deals. However most of the shopping engines seem to be sitting out Black Friday-Cyber Monday in terms of specific promotion. That includes eBay’s Shopping.com. As an aside, one of the best sites for general online shopping and price comparisons is TheFind, which also has a mobile app and a local store inventory finder.

Mo-Lo: mobile apps and local inventory sites

In addition to those already mentioned there is an ever growing list of shopping-related mobile apps. Most major retailers now have mobile apps, which typically include sale and deals information. And most of them will have their Black Friday deals there too. There are also at least 10 Black Friday specific mobile apps in the iTunes store right now, the highest rated of which is TGI Black Friday.

ShopSavvy is another mobile app that offers deals, as well as local store inventory data and newspaper weekly circular information. The app also features a barcode scanner that accesses price and product reviews content. Goodzer is another site and mobile app that tells you what stores carry products locally. It doesn’t guarantee real-time inventory information, but claims to have a larger catalog of local products than any of its competitors.

There are also a number of mobile apps that offer venue maps to get you efficiently around the mall so don’t get frustrated and have to use pepper spray on your fellow shoppers. Among them are: Micello, Point Inside and FastMall. Point Inside also features local deals content.

Decide.com, from the people who created travel site Farecast (acquired by Microsoft), will tell you whether you should buy a gadget or electronics item now or wait, based on historical pricing data. It also includes a barcode scanner and features product revenues and nearby local inventory data.

Foursquare and Shopkick are running special promotions in conjunction with credit card issuers Amex and Visa respectively. Foursquare’s is part of a promotion tied to “Small Business Saturday,” which sits between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Most of the above-mentioned apps are also available in the Android Market.

Deal sites: where every day is Black Friday

Among the top daily deal sites only LivingSocial seems to be doing a Black Friday specific set of promotions. Groupon is offering its normal deals. That generally seems to be the case for the other major deal and “flash sale sites” that I checked.

However Groupon anticipates a big holiday season and expects that consumers will be giving deals (in the form of services and experiences or Groupon purchase credit) in addition to more traditional gifts.

That’s more than enough information to digest. If I were to write more and you were to spend more time reading this you’d be delayed in getting out there and grabbing the deals before they’re gone. However if you’re reading this on a mobile device you may already be in the store or in a checkout line.

Some people have already been shopping all night. But if you haven’t started yet, here’s a little taste of what you may be in for: SNL’s mock Black Friday ad from last season.

The Dealmix Promotes Search As A Differentiator

Greg Sterling — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:05:39 +0000

One of the complaints often leveled against email-delivered daily deals is that they’re not “relevant.” A refrain I’ve heard repeatedly is, “How many ‘main-pedi’ deals do I need?” To combat this “deal fatigue,” a range of sites, including Yipit, Groupon and Google, among others, have introduced personalization. But some would argue search is a better cure.

Now a couple of Google engineers have launched The Dealmix to bring Google-like search and mapping functionality to daily deal shopping.

The site offers a map view, as well as a list view. There are also numerous ways to filter deals, for example by category and Yelp rating. The Dealmix is putting Yelp reviews into its listings/results to shortcut the process of making a decision about whether to buy a deal. (Typically people look at review sites and Yelp in particular when deciding about buying deals.)

As mentioned, users can search by keyword or phrase to find precisely the kinds of deals they’re looking for. This offers a very different experience vs. passively receiving deals in email. The Dealmix is, however, not the first or the only site to offer deal search. Bing does a great job with keyword-based deal search. Google’s The Dealmap and Citysearch also offer deal search.

The Dealmix’s map view is also very helpful, especially when looking for travel deals. This enables people to see if there are any deals for vacations or hotels in areas they’re already planning to go. However, again, the site is not the only one to offer map-based search functionality. Although I believe this travel deals map-search functionality is unique.

Interestingly Google Offers currently doesn’t have deal search of any kind (though Google’s The Dealmap does). One would expect that to change in the not-too-distant future. In addition, deals are increasingly surfacing in Google.com search results.

As a marketing vehicle, both local and national, deals are very much here to stay (for those who remain skeptical) online and in mobile. Deals will also probably play a major role in holiday gift giving this year.

Foursquare Redesign Creates Expanded Opportunities For Users, Advertisers

Greg Sterling — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:56:38 +0000

Once upon a time Foursquare was a mobile app that allowed you to “check in” places and tell your friends you were there. That seems like a long time ago now. Foursquare has evolved into a local discovery tool and loyalty platform for businesses. It has effectively won in its “check-in” segment and has moved on to bigger and better things.

It’s no longer simply a mobile app either. The Foursquare website was effectively an afterthought for a long time. But now a redesign makes Foursquare.com a full-blown destination and generally a much more interesting and useful place to explore.

There’s now a large map on the homepage (once you’re signed in) and a range of places/lists to discover:

The first thing you’ll notice when you load up foursquare.com is a big map on the top (you can click on the arrow to make it even bigger). It shows everything interesting nearby – your friends, places that are trending (in yellow), places on your lists (green), places with Specials (orange), and places that are popular (blue). You can even drag the map around or zoom in and out and all the interesting places update automatically. Try dragging it around to see how it works.

Foursquare place pages have also been redesigned and the site is more “visual” generally.

Beyond the fact that the Foursquare website now has a better UI, what the company has done that is radical is to open the aperture of time. Foursquare now becomes a “planning” tool in a way that it never really was before.

People using the Foursquare app “on the go” typically were operating in a very compressed time frame: “what’s around me now?” and “what are the tips at this place?” Usage was more “in the moment.” Even as Foursquare developed “Explore” and “Radar” those tools still didn’t lend themselves to much planning. Foursquare was much more about serendipity. And while serendipity may work for users it generally doesn’t work that well for advertisers.

The new website allows people to plan and make decisions in advance of their arrival. If I’m going to be in London next week or next month I can plan my stay with Foursquare in a way that I probably wouldn’t or couldn’t have when it was more mobile centric.

You might argue that lots of information was always available on the site to enable planning and advanced decision-making. But I would respond the site just wasn’t very interesting or pleasing to use and so it wasn’t used in this way. The new design and new features change all that, with meaningful implications for advertising.

For an advertiser to influence your decisions they need time. One of the reasons that Groupon Now is having trouble is because of this “time problem.” In the moment or near realtime it’s difficult to sway me. If I’ve made a decision it will take a lot to change my mind or get me to try a new place. However if you add more time to the equation the calculus changes.

In the morning I’m much more open to suggestions about where to go for lunch than I am right before lunch after I’ve probably already made a decision. Making Foursquare into a planning tool — for the weekend, next week or next month — enables advertisers to inject themselves into that process and make offers or expose users to their pitches.

Accordingly, I think Foursquare’s advertising opportunities become much greater as the redesign takes hold and creates new usage patterns. And the combination of this broader advertising opportunity with check-ins becomes extremely interesting not just for loyalty but also for what I’ve called “real-world analytics.”

This is clearly the beginning of a new phase for Foursquare — with a new, expanded set of use cases and advertiser opportunities.

Report: 32 Percent Of Users Do 5+ LoMo Searches Per Month

Greg Sterling — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:51:27 +0000

Local mobile ad network xAd has released its first quarterly report detailing traffic trends and user behavior on its network. While all mobile ad networks offer geotargeting, xAd is one of a small number of mobile networks that specializes in local (search and display). CPM rates are considerably higher than on more conventional mobile ad networks.

The company says it serves 10 billion monthly ad impressions. The data in the report were collected between July and September. Here are a few key points:

37 percent of general mobile consumers use their devices for local search, while 75 percent of smartphone owners conduct local searches (Google has reported even larger numbers)
Local search growth on xAd’s network has seen triple digit increases this year (with faster growth concentrated in apps vs. the mobile browser)
xAd sees 90 million local-search requests per month and over 250 million local-search requests per quarter
62 percent of users conduct at least two local searches per month, while nearly a third (32 percent) of users do at least five local lookups per month
Tuesday and Wednesday are the most active days for local-mobile search, which peaks generally during the middle of the day

The top local search categories or lookups seen on xAd’s network in Q3 were the following:

Restaurants
Gas stations
Shopping
Auto repair/dealers/rentals
Fast food
Cafes/coffee shops
Travel & lodging
Health & medical
Bars & clubs
Finance & legal

The network also reports on engagement and ad performance data, both in terms of apps vs. browser and iPhone vs. Android. The report indicates that CTRs on ads in apps are 8 percent vs. 5 percent for browser.

Call-through rates, however, are higher on browser-based ads. This difference is attributed to feature phone users calling businesses rather than seeking more information on their handsets, which offer a more constrained user experience than smartphones.

The company reported that CTR rates on the iPhone and Android are roughly comparable, but that “secondary actions” are greater on iOS. These secondary actions can include calls, map/directions access, review lookups and so on. Calls are the most popular “post-search” secondary action (62 percent), followed by maps and directions lookups (35 percent).

The xAd report also discusses demographic data. As one might expect, the heaviest users of local-mobile search tend to mirror smartphone demographics generally: a slightly more male audience (55 percent), concentrated in the 25 to 44 age range, which is also more affluent ($75K+) and educated than the general mobile population.

Apple Maps Inevitable As Company Acquires 3D Mapper C3

Greg Sterling — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:45:48 +0000

Apple has apparently bought its third mapping company, the Sweden-based C3 Technologies. The company’s site has been taken down. C3 provides 3D mapping (a la Bing Maps or Google Earth) for a number of other publishers such as Nokia (Ovi Maps) and UK directory publisher Yell. (In the wake of this transaction Nokia will probably need to shift to Bing’s 3D mapping.)

I was given a demo of the product in Europe early this year and from what I could tell it was every bit as good as anything that Microsoft or Google are doing with 3D imagery on maps. Here’s Nokia’s description of C3 and its technology:

C3 uses modern camera equipment to capture as many as one image per second of the same object from up to 100 different angles. The images are then used to automatically reproduce the shape of the objects with very high accuracy. After that, an image processing software automatically drapes each shape with the texture chosen from the pictures of each object. The same process is being applied for all objects – buildings, houses, trees, and hills – the result is a seamless canvas of 3D-data where the resolution (8 to 12 centimeters per pixel) and quality is consistent over the entire model. This is the secret to C3 maps’ realistic look compared to competitors’ hand-made and cartoonish appearance …

There are a range of European and North American cities already mapped (20 in April of this year) with more coming. Again, this is the third mapping company that Apple has acquired since 2009:

Placebase (in 2009)
Quebec-based Poly9, a Google Earth-like product (2010)
C3 Technologies

These acquisitions together argue that at some point in the next 12 months (or so) Apple will replace some or all of the Google Maps functionality on iOS devices with its own product. Perhaps that will happen with next year’s rollout of iPhone 5, also rumored to be LTE compatible. It might require a faster iPhone to enable Apple’s maps vision to come to fruition.

In March of this year Apple posted a job for an iOS Maps Application Developer:

Come work for the team that revolutionized the mobile technology industry as it continues to define what computing looks like in a post-PC era. The Maps team is looking for a proactive and hardworking software engineer to join our team. Along with excellent skills in object-oriented software design and programming, the successful candidate will have real-world experience developing sophisticated user interfaces. Excellent communication skills are also a must, as you will be collaborating closely with Apple’s peerless human interface team to add new and innovative features.

Apple also said in April that it was “now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.” In June Apple renewed or extended its mapping deal with Google. That appears to be a stop-gap of sorts until Apple is satisfied that its replacement product is ready.

Given how livid Steve Jobs was over Android (see his “thermonuclear war” comment) it’s a safe bet that the change from Google Maps to an in-house Apple mapping platform has been a long-time in the making — much like Alexandre Dumas’ literary Count of Monte Cristo methodically carried out his revenge against those who had betrayed him. It will be interesting to see whether and how Apple improves upon Google Maps when it eventually launches.

Below is just one of many demo videos on YouTube showing C3 capabilities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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