Re: Day 5: Meta-searching & beyond: Local Search

At 08:23 AM 2/13/2004, you wrote:
>Can you fill us in on the concept of local search, and why it's said to be 
>the future of search?

It's one future of search, and one that will likely do quite well once a 
number of major obstacles have been overcome.  Until now, we've tended to 
think of search primarily as finding information.  As online retail has 
become more accepted, that definition has expanded to include 
transactions.  The next phase is to localize the search for both 
information and transactions.  Some take this to mean simply figuring out 
how to get the local yellow pages online effectively, but it's more than that.

True, effective local search will not only take into account your location, 
and connect you with what you're looking for within a certain radius of 
miles.  Local search should also take into account the various 
relationships you've established within a community -- memberships, 
accounts, preferences, etc.  It will also know about your likes and 
dislikes (Peet's not Starbucks, Volvo not Ford (yes, I know that's a 
contradiction...:-) ). In other words, the search service will need to know 
quite a bit about you beyond your physical location to work really well.

Say you're looking for a doctor.  Ideally, the search should have info 
about your insurance plan, the condition you're seeking help for, and so 
on.  It should also incorporate some of the trendy social networking 
concepts found in services like Friendster and Orkut -- letting you tap 
into recommendations from friends, acquaintances, and so on.  Perhaps it 
will also be able to access disciplinary records from medical associations, 
or information from watchdog groups.

The result: potentially really good matches for doctors.  But the 
challenges to get there are immense, starting with the biggest issue of 
all: privacy.  Will we really want to trust a system with so much intensely 
personal information?  Who will assure that marketers or the government 
doesn't get its hands on this info?

If the current generation of search engines maintain their current 
so-called privacy policies, it won't be Google or Yahoo who succeed at 
this... though maybe they will.  I don't think anyone pays any attention to 
their privacy policies or terms of service.  I'm astounded by the fanatic 
interest in Orkut, Google's new "friends" network.  Have a look at this 
paragraph from Orkut's terms of service <http://www.orkut.com/terms.html>:

orkut.com's proprietary rights

"By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the 
orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, 
non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, 
irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly 
perform and display such Materials."

So much for privacy!  All your bass are belong to Google...

But I digress.  Next week in SearchDay I'll be running a guest article by 
Greg Sterling, an analyst for the Kelsey Group who specializes in local 
search -- it has some interesting, hard data on the trend, if you're 
interested.

Regards,
Chris


...............................
Chris Sherman
Associate Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday
...............................



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