May 15 2008
Local Search News NSB
Natural Search Blog
- Local Search & Social Media Company Praized Worth Watching - Praized, a startup that offers a social media app targeted to locally-oriented blogs and sites, is well worth watching. The app allows blogs to easily provide their constituents the ability to rate local businesses, and display the ratings alongside the traditional directory info of biz name, address, and maps. (click to enlarge) (Try out their local search [...]
- Decider Enters Local Search - Humorous faux-newspaper, The Onion, has launched a new local directory site called Decider in beta. While The Onion is famous for its satirical “news” articles, Decider is a decidedly serious guide intended to complement their other offerings like serious classifieds and the A.V. Club (The Onion’s arts and entertainment site). Decider brings local business listings for [...]
- Orion Panel: Tech & Info Giants - 3rd Keynote at SES San Jose 08 - The Orion Keynote Panel, “Technical & Information Giants”, touched on fairly broad topic areas this afternoon at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Speakers included Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Rich LeFurgy (Partner, Archer Advisors), Kirsten Mangers (Co-Founder & CEO, WebVisible), Robert Scoble (Managing Director, FastCompany.TV), Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land), and Tim Westergren [...]
- Print Yellow Pages Usage On Decline Or Not? - My article on how the “Yellow Pages Usage Stats Are Likely Wrong” went up earlier at Search Engine Land, and the details I highlight in it provide some strong circumstantial evidence that this year’s earlier industry statistics stating that print YP book usage hadn’t dropped over the year previous are likely incorrect. As I point out, [...]
- SMX LoMo Keynote: Frazier Miller - Frazier Miller, General Manager of Yahoo! Local, spoke yesterday here at the SMX Local & Mobile conference in San Francisco. Yahoo! Local’s Frazier Miller It was very interesting to hear the take on local & mobile from one of Yahoo! Local’s top thought leaders. It was obvious that Frazier has a very tight grip on understanding what [...]
- Australian Yellow Pages Finally Optimizes For Search Engines - The Australian edition of Lifehacker reports that Sensis, Telestra’s yellow pages division, has finally allowed bots to crawl their online yellow pages so links to their listings are now showing up in Google SERPs and other search engines. Previously, they were apparently blocking Google and bots by either using robots.txt disallow rules and/or blocking [...]
- Top 25 Things Vanishing from America: The Yellow Pages - AOL’s Walletpop blog has created a list of the Top 25 Things Vanishing from America. They listed “The Yellow Pages” as item number 24, along with such things as outhouses, classified ads, dial-up internet access, phone landlines, VCRs, cameras that use film, and more. I’ve written before about how print yellow pages usage is decreasing due [...]
- Yellow Pages Guerilla Ad Campaign - I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies (”SES”) Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the YellowPages.ca booth in the exhibit hall: I’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the [...]
- Google Maps Introduces User Review Snippets in Listings - The Google Lat Long Blog announced today that they’ve introduced little snippets of a user review with each business listing for which they have reviews data: (click to enlarge) To me, this seems like a bit of an experimental feature, since I tend to want to see a sampling of multiple reviews to try to get a [...]
- Whitepages.com Acquiring Snapvine, Focuses On Community Development - WhitePages.com is acquiring Snapvine, a service that allows people to associate audio files with various resources like social networks, photos, text, and blogs. Snapvine enables facilitates voice blogs, similar to podcasting, but perhaps with a little greater ease. WhitePages states on their blog that they’ll use Snapvine’s technology to provide their users with free, private voicemail [...]