May 7, 2011 at 11:16am ET by Greg Sterling

As a long-time Android user I can tell you two specific areas where Android beats the iPhone's otherwise superior user experience hands down: speech and navigation. All text fields on Android devices are speech-enabled, including email, SMS and the search box on any site. The iPhone offers "voice control commands" that allow users to initiate a call or play music with speech. But the breadth of what you can do on the iPhone with voice is much more narrow. There is of course voice search on the Google and Bing apps, but that has to do with Google and Microsoft's own technology and nothing to [...]

AT&T: 43 Percent Of Local-Mobile Searchers “Walk Through The Door”

Apr 21, 2011 at 4:36pm ET by Greg Sterling

There are a number of studies (e.g., Pew, Forrester) in the market that question how interested or engaged users are with "location based services." Those studies tend to narrowly focus on Foursquare, Gowalla and mobile check-ins. They tend to miss the larger point about the importance of location on mobile devices. A new study from AT&T Interactive and Nielsen, conducted this March, validates that location is a key part of the mobile-user experience. The study also reflects the often-superior performance of local-mobile ads. Restaurants the Top Local-Mobile Category AT&T VP S [...]

eBay Buys Location-Based Services Pioneer WHERE.com

Apr 20, 2011 at 11:07am ET by Greg Sterling

Adding to its LBS portfolio, eBay has acquired Boston-based WHERE.com, which has a popular mobile app and operates a "hyper-local" mobile ad network. Last year eBay bought local product inventory finder Milo.com. The terms of the WHERE deal were not disclosed. Great Mix of Assets WHERE, which began as uLocate, will apparently be housed in the PayPal business unit. WHERE itself acquired a deals site last year called LocalGinger. The combination of WHERE's location technology, ad network and deals capability proved a compelling mix to eBay, which has been searching for new sources of gro [...]

Yellow Pages Industry Association Changes Name To Focus On “Local Search”

Apr 18, 2011 at 10:47am ET by Greg Sterling

After months of deliberation the Yellow Pages Association has changed its name and brand identity to the "Local Search Association." The name change reflects the transformation of yellow pages organizations from publishers of primarily print directories to multi-platform providers of leads, calls and clicks to local businesses. The organization is also reaching out to new constituencies that surround the yellow pages and local search industries. New members of the expanded trade association include CityGrid, MerchEngines, Kudzu, Telnic Limited, Kenshoo, Thrive Analytics, deCarta, dotMobi, [...]

Marchex Acquires 800-Free-411 Owner Jingle Networks

Apr 11, 2011 at 8:31am ET by Greg Sterling

Marchex announced this morning that it was buying Jingle Networks, operator of free directory assistance service 800-Free-411, for $62 million in cash and stock. Founded in 2004, Jingle Networks also has a pay-per-call mobile ad network. Jingle's 800-Free-411 competed with GOOG-411, which was closed down last year, and Microsoft's Bing-411, which is still operating. However Jingle was the leader in the "free directory assistance" segment. At one point I called free-DA "local-mobile search for the rest of us." That was before the dramatic growth of smartphones, which have continued to ero [...]

Google Adding Local Product Data To Place Pages

Apr 6, 2011 at 9:29am ET by Greg Sterling

Since early 2006 I've been writing about the "offline future of online shopping." And since that time a collection of startups has been working, mostly under the radar, to bring real-time local product inventory data to the internet. In November of 2010 Google joined that effort with local product search. Now when you do a product search Google will show you local store availability -- mostly at large retail chains. However, Google just said in a blog post that it's also going to make local product availability a feature of Place Pages: When you provide Google with local product availabil [...]

Mobile Search Use Stats: Big At Home, When Watching TV, While Running Errands

Mar 23, 2011 at 9:25am ET by Greg Sterling

For those who believe that mobile search is just done by users "on the go," guess again. A series of research reports and findings have come out over the past couple of weeks that show heavy smartphone and mobile search use also happens at home and even while other devices are being used, such as watching TV or suprisingly, even when using a computer. Performics Does Mobile Search Study Previous reports from Yahoo and InsightExpress have already shown some of this surprising behavior. This week Performics released its own mobile search report, which was commissioned to better understand how [...]

Placecast and AT&T Launch Geo-fenced Mobile “ShopAlerts”

Feb 28, 2011 at 7:16am ET by Greg Sterling

Mobile carrier AT&T is introducing location-based "ShopAlerts" with Placecast in four US cities: NY, SF, Chicago and LA. This is opt-in "push" marketing via SMS or MMS tied to "geo-fences." Privacy is a non-issue because of the opt-in dimension. Once a user has opted-in, which can happen on AT&T's site, Facebook or many other places (e.g., display ads online) that person will receive alerts (offers, promotions) when he or she physically enters the designated local area, which is defined by the advertiser (e.g., a mile from retail store XYZ). Initial advertisers that have sign [...]

SearchReviews: A Search Engine For 40 Million Reviews (And Counting)

Feb 15, 2011 at 9:00am ET by Matt McGee

SearchReviews has just launched a search engine with more than 40 million reviews in its system, and plans to hit 100 million reviews by the end of 2011. Those 40 million reviews cover about four million products and come from more than a thousand sites such as TripAdvisor, Amazon, Zappos and others. Those are impressive numbers, but is SearchReviews any good? More on that below along with a look at how it works. How SearchReviews Works SearchReviews appears to have the largest searchable database of strictly review content anywhere. Buzzillions advertises having 13 million reviews; Baza [...]

deCarta Challenges Google With Free Mapping, Local Search Tools Aimed At Mobile Developers

Feb 14, 2011 at 10:45am ET by Greg Sterling

Today at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, deCarta announced a set of free developer tools intended to challenge Google Maps and Places. I received a briefing last week and was impressed by the suite of products and tools, which include the following: White Label Maps Application White Label Local Search Engine Maps APIs LBS Server Technology Turn-by-Turn Navigation All the basic services are free and have larger limits than Google Maps API. There are two premium versions of the service that cost money after API limits are hit. In addition to maps and navigation, deC [...]

Yelp: 35 Percent Of Searches Mobile Now

Feb 4, 2011 at 10:13am ET by Greg Sterling

Yelp released some new mobile data yesterday based on usage and activity in December. The company said that its mobile apps generated calls to local businesses "every other second." Here are some of the other data: 3.2 million unique visitors used a Yelp mobile app Every other second a consumer generated directions to a local business A photo was uploaded every 30 seconds from a Yelp mobile app Most striking to this audience will be the following stat: "35% of all searches on Yelp.com came from a Yelp mobile app." The mobile audience on Yelp is more active and engaged than its PC [...]

Report: 7 Percent Of Mobile Internet Users Have Checked Out Location-Based Services

Nov 4, 2010 at 7:54am ET by Greg Sterling

The Pew Internet Project published findings from a recent survey about usage of "location-based services" (LBS). According to the Pew data, 7 percent of mobile Internet users are on location-based services and 4 percent of all internet-using adults "use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby." These findings appear to track and validate an earlier Forrester Research survey that found 4 percent of online adults had used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Other surveys have found [...]

Search Engine Local.com Dramatically Upgrades

Nov 3, 2010 at 11:50am ET by Greg Sterling

Local.com is one of the veterans in the local search segment but its consumer destination site has generally lagged competitors in several ways. The company has now rectified that to a significant degree by launching a totally overhauled UI and user experience. There's also considerable new or enhanced content that didn't previously exist. The new site is organized around local business search, coupons and local events. It offers a bolder look across the board, with more "branding" than before. The homepage is somewhat reminiscent of Bing with its large, changing graphic. Overall the [...]

Yelp Plans To Go Public

Oct 5, 2010 at 10:18am ET by Matt McGee

Local search powerhouse Yelp is planning to go public at some point in the future. That's something that Yelp COO Geoff Donaker confirmed during his keynote conversation today at our SMX East conference in New York City. "We don’t see any reason not to be an independent company for years to come. Will we go public at some point? Certainly that’s the intention," Donaker told Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman. Donaker explained that Yelp's fund raising event earlier this year -- an investment of up to $100 million from Elevation Partners -- will allow the company to re [...]

Live Blog: SMX Keynote Conversation With Yelp COO, Geoff Donaker

Oct 5, 2010 at 9:00am ET by Matt McGee

Good morning! It's almost time for day two of SMX East to begin and the plan is to live blog this morning's keynote conversation between Yelp COO Geoff Donaker and Search Engine Land Executive Editor, Chris Sherman. But first, I'm the master of ceremonies and so I need to run up to the stage and do some introductions. Back in a moment! Okay, that was quick and painless. So here we go! Nice to have a keynote on local search, which is a subject near and dear to my heart. Chris asks first for some background on Yelp and the focus on local search. Geoff Donaker: Yelp is the place you go w [...]

Report: Local Search Users Better Prospects, But Market Complex And Fragmented

Oct 5, 2010 at 8:14am ET by Greg Sterling

Anyone who cares about "local search" should pay attention. Yesterday at SMX East Agency TMP Directional Marketing/15Miles and comScore released their fourth annual Local Search Usage Study. A veritable cornucopia of data, the study continues to document the migration of local business lookups from traditional media to online. But the data also show the growing importance of social media and the rise of mobile, as well as the continuing fragmentation of audiences in the local space. There's a great deal of information in the report, more than I'm able to present in this brief post. However [...]

Yelp Unlikely To Come Back To Google Places

Aug 26, 2010 at 2:45pm ET by Greg Sterling

Earlier today it was reported that Yelp's content had been removed from Google Places -- though not from Google.com results. What's going on exactly? Here's Google's public statement about it: "Place pages organize relevant information about a wide range of places and locations, and they surface great sources of information like reviews and photos about 'places' ranging from restaurants to parks to landmarks to cities. Regarding the presentation of Yelp review snippets, neither of us was happy with the data as it appeared, so we reclassified results from Yelp while we reviewed our [...]

Google Maps Updates Review Policy & Drops Yelp Reviews

Aug 26, 2010 at 9:37am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Maps Blog announced they have updated the maps review policy on how to write reviews and what reviews Google has the right to remove. In addition, TechCrunch reports that Google has dropped Yelp's syndicated reviews from Google Maps. The new Google Maps review guidelines share tips on how to write constructive reviews. Some of those tips include make the reviews informative and insightful, use your real stories and not stuff that didn't happen to you, be nice even with negative reviews by making them constructive and not disrespectful, and finally write them well using proper [...]

Google And Yelp Express “Complicated” Relationship In Conference Interview

Jul 31, 2010 at 11:15am ET by Greg Sterling

There's nothing that jaded and weary conference goers love more than to see some "red meat" conflict between panelists during a session. And that's what TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld repeatedly tried to elicit in an on-stage interview of Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Google's John Hanke during the Social Currency CrunchUp event yesterday in Palo Alto California. Schonfeld baited Stoppelman and Hanke a number of times with questions about the aborted Google acquisition of Yelp, Apple CEO Steve Jobs' remark that "Search is not where it’s at [in mobile]," as well as Google's crawling and us [...]

Fwix Launches Hyperlocal Search Engine

Jul 21, 2010 at 5:22pm ET by Matt McGee

Fwix, a growing player in the hyperlocal news space, has launched the beta version of what it's calling a Local Trend Search tool at search.fwix.com. It lets users search for things "happening at any place right now" (recently would be more accurate) at more than 200 English-speaking locations worldwide. (click for larger version) The above is a search conducted this afternoon for yankee stadium with New York as the city location. (I moved the map around a bit to improve the screenshot.) On the far left, you see several types of content refinements -- News, Events, Photos, and Up [...]

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