This is research from Pew Internet and American Life Project. You can fill in the underlined part with just about anything else and search engines will dominate as the number one source. This is not going to change anytime soon.
People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source.
One of the people familiar with the project said that the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.
Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. Facebook redesigned its business pages last year, with the hope of offering more features for small-business owners. According to Facebook, the Web site currently hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world.
via Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.
NY Times reporting:
“I think Google is going to be the new Yellow Pages,” Mr. Cowie said. “More and more of these younger kids are used to Google. They are looking at their phones rather than opening up a phone book.”
Ping – Google’s New Approach to Courting Small Businesses – NYTimes.com.
“We’ve really transformed from being a division of a telephone company… Our focus is on becoming the ad agency for small and medium businesses in America,”
via CORRECTED – Yellow – Pages Plot High Tech Road Out Of Bankruptcy – NYTimes.com.
I’ve written about the Yellowpages companies in the past and I know it pissed a few people off. My general commentary was that their clear and present danger wasn’t secular decline, it was the enormous amount of debt that had been piled into those companies. Now that these companies are moving past those issues, I expect to see interesting things.
Lots of us in the Local space proselytize about the need to verify your Local data with third-party information providers like InfoUSA, SuperPages.com, and InsiderPages.com that Google and Yahoo draw on to populate and confirm their own databases.
But the rise of citations suggests that this process should be taken one step further. Not only should you verify your data with these larger data providers, but Google seems to be actively spidering smaller sites both in your keyword niche AND your geographical niche. These range anywhere from knock-off YellowPages to the homepage of your grandma’s knitting circle. So take the time to submit to sites that you might not have thought were worth it before.
via Mihmorandum | Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link | General Marketing.
Two-thirds to three-quarters of the time, he says, when the iPhone locates itself, it’s doing so using the Skyhook Wi-Fi geolocation software built in to the phone, and not GPS.
More interestingly, how Skyhook works:
How do you maintain a geo-database of Wi-Fi hot spots, especially when more and more of them are now behind security passwords? As before, Morgan says, Skyhook employees and contractors “wardrive” down millions of miles of roads to correlate location (from GPS) with the signatures of Wi-Fi access points. Morgan said that Wi-Fi beacons are unique even when security is turned on, so that’s not a factor.
via Skyhook’s love/hate relationship with GPS | Rafe’s Radar – CNET News.
How Google evolved it’s local sales strategy:
After several years of experiments Google essentially recognized the need to develop sales channel and reseller partnerships with companies that had more direct reach into the small business market. (Yahoo and Microsoft also have these partnerships to a lesser degree.) The ecosystem reflected above was not engineered by Google; it emerged largely “organically” in response to the needs of publishers and small businesses, which didn’t have the time or inclination to master AdWords themselves.
via AdQuants: Top Local Search Advertisers Are Traffic Resellers.
That’s the question that this NYT article ponders:
Idearc has confronted its own debt problems for some time: it hired Merrill Lynch and Moelis & Company as advisers last fall. Its latest round of problems arose from a 27 percent drop in fourth-quarter net income, atop a 7 percent drop in revenue.
The company said it is also considering negotiating with its lenders and bondholders, through some form of a prepackaged or prenegotiated bankruptcy. It warned that such efforts may fail, forcing it to make a regular filing for bankruptcy protection.
This makes sense. Although it won’t materially impact the top line this year, it could in the future. The key question here is whether someone can solve the local ad scalability issue without an army of salespeople. I favor this approach but I’m sure the landscape will look quite different in twenty years.
One is a new ad system from Yahoo, currently installed at about 100 newspapers, that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed at specific audiences, like car buyers or sports enthusiasts. The system puts users into those groups based on the pages they visit online, a technique known as behavioral targeting.
This allows publishers to sell, say, high-priced travel ads not only on travel pages but also on any page visited by a user interested in travel.
