Graphic Comparing Online to Offline Buying

Here’s a nice graphic from the folks at Milo.com showing the percentages (based on US govt. data) of shopping and buying that occur online vs. in store by category (click to enlarge):

All the offline numbers are in the high 90s.

Telmetrics: Google Click2Call Good for Industry

The following is a piece by Bill Dinan, President of Telmetrics, about Google’s recent expansion of its Click to Call mobile advertising program and its potential larger significance in the market. The opinions are solely those of the author . . .

While search monetization for Google has always been about clicks and measuring online activity, this move validates the complementary relationship between online search and offline consumer purchasing behavior.  Online drives offline, so clicks and calls go hand in hand. Add mobile to the equation and Google recognizes a revenue opportunity in tracking the connection between mobile searching and the resulting calls. Advertisers benefit because they get a more complete view of the response generated by a mobile advertising program.

But Google’s approach is different–other providers’ monetization models price calls separately and typically higher than clicks. You have to wonder why Google has come out with a lower price for calls, when industry experience demonstrates calls can be monetized at higher levels than clicks. Our guess is that they wanted to keep the mobile model simple for advertisers that are already comfortable with paying for clicks while still developing a revenue stream that accounts for the offline connection.

Does Google’s move into click-to-call hurt other online properties offering pay per call solutions?

No, because Google’s move is consistent with their click-based model. Google’s model is not pay per call – it is a complementary model on the mobile device but it is still pay per click. Click-to-call doesn’t automatically translate to pay per call.  However, Google’s move reinforces the need to track consumer online-offline searching and buying patterns.

Have national advertisers showed interest in mobile click-to-call or pay per call ads?

National advertisers have showed interest in mobile advertising, but more importantly they are looking for more transparency and performance-based advertising across all traditional and digital mediums to validate their ad spend.

Click-to-call provides similar data to a click-based model and those advertisers already used to pay-per-click via Google will find that click-to-call is a natural extension and complementary. Those advertisers already using call-based metrics either through pay per call or subscription programs will still be looking for true call response data which by virtue of the information attached to calls provides richer data about consumer behavior.

Bike on Through to the Other Side

Last night Google announced the inclusion of bike directions to car, public transit and walking directions options on Google Maps. According to Google Maps’ Shannon Guymon this was one of the most requested missing features on Google Maps.

The new bike directions also provide a new view on maps (see below), one that is more “bike friendly” and emphasizes some features while de-emphasizing others (e.g., freeways, busy roads).

The directions and underlying data to support bike directions come from Google’s Street View effort as well as selected third parties that have already mapped biked trials (i.e., Rails to Trails Conservancy). Here’s an example of the difference between driving and bike directions from AT&T Park (baseball stadium) in San Francisco to the Golden Gate Park:

The rest of this post is on SEL.

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See related: Street View Best Streets Awards in the UK and Edit Places Using Street View images.

Yelp Launches Webinars for SMBs

Yelp is introducing a series of webinars for small business on various topics, which include how to use Yelp more effectively. Here’s the Yelp blog post that went up today:

In our ongoing effort to educate business owners on ways they can use Yelp, we are excited to kick off Yelp for Your Business, a webinar series. The inaugural webinar will be held this Thursday, 3/11 at 3pm PT/6pm ET. The subject will be “How to use the free tools on Yelp to promote your business.” Click here to learn more or to register for the webinar.

This is smart and Yelp should have done this a year ago. But better late . . . This will not only build good will and help address the myths and misconceptions but it will turn into advertising sales as well.

Facebook Location Sharing Coming Soon

Facebook just told me they have nothing additional to add to the NY Times story about adding location to updates and (finally) rolling out a location API: 

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

This follows Twitter’s earlier location API and acquisition of MixerLabs and its GeoAPI. Foursquare is also offering an API. 

So on one level we’ll have the battle of the developer location APIs. But perhaps more interesting to consider is how deeply Facebook wants to push into Foursquare and Yelp territory. I previously wrote on Internet2Go:

If Facebook does add check-ins for mobile devices does it “kill” Foursquare? My answer would be “no.” Facebook has a massive mobile user base, true, but Foursquare has a loyal following. Just as various Google products were launched in many instances with the moniker “X-Killer,” only in a few cases has this actually turned out to be true. Navigation is one of them.

However, Google Checkout didn’t kill PayPal. Google Base (now closed) didn’t kill Craigslist. Knol didn’t kill Wikipedia. Lively didn’t kill Second Life (yes, it’s still around). Okut didn’t kill . . . well, it hasn’t done very well outside a few isolated markets. And Facebook hasn’t killed Twitter, despite becoming much more Twitter-like over the past six months. 

I had predicted that Facebook would buy Foursquare, but instead the social media site appears to be trying to adopt some of its functionality. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley is a smart guy and understands that he has to keep ahead of his competitors with new content and features.  

It would have been smart for Facebook to buy Foursquare — the rumor was that it was sniffing around Loopt — but that ship may have sailed and Dennis Crowley might be adverse to selling, at least at this stage, given his past experience with Dodgeball and Google. 

I just spoke with with Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan who credited Crowley with having a “real vision” as opposed to many of the sites in the LBS space, which don’t necessarily have any direction, so to speak. 

Facebook in a way is like the high school basketball star that is being recruited by dozens of top-tier colleges; there’s a wealth of choices and options and that may bring with it hesitation and uncertainty surrounding what to pursue and how fast or deeply. Facebook literally could dominate sectors in ways that almost no other company save Google has the potential to do. 

As you remember from your Facebook history, the company started as a location-based social network, around colleges and high schools. With the new location API and sharing it will be returning to its local roots — in a manner of speaking. 

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See related post: Location Will Be Everywhere

Has Anyone Heard the Google “YP” Ad?

I got this note from someone this morning:

I was wondering if you have heard/know of an advertising campaign that Google is running on radio promoting the fact that they have a $300 yellow pages product.

The product from what I have been told is their listing enhancement product. I received a call from one of my colleagues indicating they heard a radio ad on headline news on Sirus where Google was promoting this product and used the yellow pages name a number of times throughout the ad.

Has anyone heard this? If so is the description above correct?

Where Launches Mobile ‘Hyper-Local’ Ads

uLocate, which operates popular mobile site/app Where, has launched WHERE Ads, which it’s positioning as a new “hyper-local” ad network. Last week I spoke to Where marketing kingpin Dan Gilmartin about it.

Gilmartin told me this initiative grew out of the company’s (and it’s users’) frustration with conventional mobile display advertising and third party networks that too often supplied ad inventory wasn’t very relevant, he said. The company has thus created its own solution and is going to make it available to third parties. As part of that Where also distributes local ads from other networks and sites (e.g., CityGrid). 

The rest of this post is at Internet2Go. 

Analog Analytics Helps Pubs Challenge Groupon

I had a very interesting discussion yesterday with Ken Kalb of Analog Analytics, a company which can either be described as a deals/coupon and mobile (SMS) marketing platform or an analytics provider for traditional media. But of course it’s both.

Here are the relevant paragraphs from the release:

Analog Analytics today officially launches its software platform to deliver highly monetizing interactive coupons, gift certificates and “Bigger Better Deals” for local publishers and advertisers in any media. Now, publishers of all types, including online, mobile, newspaper, TV, radio, motion picture and billboards, will benefit from the much higher click-through rates (CTR) of two- to ten-percent for these highly interactive offerings. This CTR amounts to 10 to 100 times greater than the national average for display ads. 

The Analog Analytics platform provides publishers which have struggled to make money with their online content with a mechanism to increase their ad revenue regardless of the media. It enables advertisers or publishers to create online, mobile or a text-message call-to-action print coupons or gift certificates, integrating and optimizing the performance of both traditional advertising and online interactive. With this solution publishers leverage advertising in multiple media concurrently from the software-as-a-service platform and immediately increase their ad revenue. 

Analog Analytics has already signed up a number of substantial customers including Village Voice Media, Local.com, Wick, Media News Group, the nation’s leading weeklies as well as 850 publishers and 2500 advertisers nationally.

I could now write 5K words. But I don’t have time. So I’ll try and hit a few high points. 

Analog Analytics is a platform licensed to mostly traditional media companies (as indicated in the list above). It enables publishers to offer a more “robust” coupon and deals solution in general and to better compete with the emerging “threat” from what I’ll call the “Groupon Segment.” 

The following is an example of a group-buying deal offering (“bigger, better deal“) from the company. In a sort of tongue-in-cheek way Kalb referred to this as “the Groupon killer.” It’s not but it gives traditional publishers a weapon against these fast-growing group-buying sites. 

Otherwise the company enables the local sales channel to sell/offer more traditional coupons and gift certificates:

The publisher can price and package any of this how it desires. Whereas Groupon, et al. offer an effective but limited new customer acquisition tool — I characterized it to Kalb as a “one-night stand” — the array of options here provide both new customer acquisition and CRM/loyalty capabilities. And, as I said, the flip side is traditional media analytics.

People redeem the coupon or opt-in to the SMS list and the publisher (and advertiser) sees how effective the traditional medium is — or isn’t as the case may be. But as the Analog Analytics release points out response rates with offers/deals are at least 10X vs. traditional display advertising online. 

Coupons/offers/deals isn’t merely a cute, consumer-friendly trend, it’s a digital and direct marketing phenomenon that’s here to stay. The Groupon proposition to the SMB is “no risk”: “you only pay if people buy.” It doesn’t get any more CPA than that.

Kalb also emphasized with me that these sites enable local businesses to book revenue in advance. The new products in the coupon and group-buying segments are “tangible” and easily understood by SMBs compared with clicks, “Which is an abstraction to small business,” explained Kalb. 

The market is changing quickly now for SMB marketing. Phenomena like social media and couponing are becoming more visible and effective tools and they often “cut out the middle man,” as people used to say. In this case the “middle man” is the traditional sales channel/publisher. 

If you take a deeper look it starts to become clear that “Grouponing” is just the clever packing of a more concrete form of direct digital marketing.

Forrester Looking at Wrong End of Commerce

The WSJ and TechCrunch cover Forrester’s relatively bullish e-commerce forecast. This is from the WSJ:

In 2009, e-commerce in the U.S. managed to buck the recession that dragged down the rest of retail, growing 11% to reach $155.2 billion, according to Forrester Research. The research firm is predicting in a report out Monday that e-commerce in America will grow another 11% this year.

The Forrester e-commerce number from 2009 — 6% of total retail sales — is inflated. Forrester uses a smaller sample than US government data, which shows e-commerce at 3.8% of total US retail sales (in Q4).

Here’s the more interesting part of the Forrester data, as reported in the WSJ:

And a new area of focus for retailers isn’t online buying at all. Rather, it us using the Internet and mobile technology to influence sales that happen in stores. Already Forrester’s study found that 42% of all retail purchases in 2009 – worth some $917 billion – were influenced by the Web in some way. By 2014 that figure is likely to jump to 53%.

These figures are probably off as well. The online –>offline number should be larger. Recall that Compete/TNS conducted a survey in which it found that 94% did research online prior to (online) purchase. Prior studies by comScore, BIGResearch, Yahoo! and others have found 80% to more than 90% of consumers buying in-store have consulted the Internet for information prior to purchase.

The challenge, in gaining a true picture of consumer behavior, is measuring this online–>offline impact on a campaign basis. There are various methodologies to try and get at this: call tracking, coupons, surveys, sales lift, attribution modeling.

Ironically, as I’ve said in the past, mobile will likely boost e-commerce as people visit stores to check out products and then buy online if they find a better price.

Geodomains: An Untapped Market?

Companies and people in local seem to be on the lookout for new sources of traffic, new business partners and so on. One area that’s largely untapped is the Associated Cities consortium of geodomains (e.g., NewOrleans.com). This is a confederation of 150 local sites that collectively have more than 10 million uniques per month.

The organization has a conference in New Orleans at the end of April. I have a conflict or I’d be speaking and attending. However, if you want to speak, sponsor, pitch a session or attend you can contact Patrick Carleton, Executive Director, Associated cities. His contact details can be found on this page.

If you’re a content syndicator, local channel, platform provider, etc . . . this is a potentially eager audience. And these sites also represent another potentially great source of local traffic.

It may sound like I’m selling but I genuinely think there’s an interesting opportunity and this is a neglected group of sites that are potentially highly valuable to those in the local space.

Citysearch Revamps SEM, Buys into OrangeSoda

This morning Citysearch is unveiling a new local online ad program called “CityGrid Complete,” managed and fulfilled partly by OrangeSoda. The IAC-owned company has also invested in OrangeSoda as part of the new relationship. 

I spoke last week with Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti who said that the company chose OrangeSoda because Citysearch believes it has the best SEO solution in the  market. OrangeSoda has been offering SEO, paid-search and what it calls “loccal search maps optimization.” The latter is now the chief focus of “local SEO.” 

According to the press release: 

The first of its kind, CityGrid Complete is the only online advertising solution that gives local businesses the ability to reach millions of consumers monthly by building customizable content ads that are distributed across the web. In addition to content ads, CityGrid Complete includes SEO services designed to drive consumers from all the major search engines directly to their own websites. CityGrid Complete customers also receive access to an integrated web-based dashboard allowing advertisers to actively monitor and manage their campaigns, ensuring they receive the highest quality leads for their advertising budgets.

CityGrid Complete will source leads through Citysearch’s CityGrid network, which the company says has “500K paying advertisers, enhanced listings and content for 15M businesses, and reaches more than 140M unique users across 100 web and mobile sites.” OrangeSoda will be managing SEO and paid-search campaigns. CityGrid  Complete is, as the name suggests, the most complete of the Citysearch ad programs. There will be less ambitious programs for those with smaller budgets.

Herratti was asserting to me that this new offering is the most effective and comprehensive for SMBs available online — a true “one-stop shop.” To the SMBs themselves Citysearch’s ad programs may not look very different than before, but the platform, sourcing and fulfillment on the back end is going to be quite different. 

It appears that through CityGrid Citysearch has now built a way to deliver leads to its advertiser-customers that is substantially cheaper overall — without a corresponding loss in quality — than pure PPC reliance, which is the way most of these programs began. (ReachLocal and V-Enable also offer “local ad exchanges.”)

This is also great validation for OrangeSoda, which is always mentioned as the fourth local SEM firm: ReachLocal, WebVisible, Yodle . . . and OrangeSoda. 

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the evolution of the ad products that are being offered to the local market and how they’re “diversifying” into SEO, data monitoring and reputation management. The new CityGrid Compete program is another general example of that phenomenon. 

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See this previous, related post about CityGrid.

Outside.in vs. AOL Patch: Win-Win?

Matthew Ingram at GigaOm has a nice profile of Outside.in and interview with CEO Mark Josephson. The piece points out that AOL is planning to spend $50 million to build Patch into a giant local network, and asks whether sites like Outside.in should be worried. First here’s what AOL said in a 10K filing about its plan for Patch:

The Patch acquisition did not significantly affect our consolidated financial results for the year ended December 31, 2009. As part of our plan to expand our local strategic initiatives, we currently anticipate investing up to $50.0 million in Patch during the remainder of 2010.

Should Outside.in be worried?

In the GigaOm article, Josephson correctly points out that “If AOL spends $50 million and brings a lot of attention and advertisers into online hyper-local then we all benefit.” Indeed, the entire segment will win if advertisers wake up to the real potential of local online, which they’re now starting to (almost as an indirect result of mobile). 

It will also be really interesting to see how “good” Patch is. The $50 million is undoubtedly for headcount and writing fees to those creating original content. The danger as with Examiner.com is that you get a lot of mediocre stuff. Outside.in’s approach is one of aggregation of existing content, which is both cheaper and more scalable. 

Outside.in has received about $14 million in funding. AOL ought to take a hard look at buying Outside.in if it’s really as serious as it claims to be about “hyper-local.”

SMBs Are Getting Older

Here are some interesting stats drawn from an article in the NY Times about people starting their own businesses at 50 and older:

• More than five million Americans age 55 or older run their own businesses or are otherwise self-employed, according to the Small Business Administration. And the number of self-employed people ages 55 to 64 is soaring, the agency says, climbing 52 percent from 2000 to 2007.
• Americans age 55 and above started 18.9 percent of all businesses created in 2008, compared with 10 percent in 2001. 

Roost Launches FB App for Local Realtors

Roost CEO Alex Chang sent me a note last week alerting me to the launch of the company’s app on Facebook, “Social Real Estate.” It enables local agents to create a “real estate” tab on their pages full of market data and other information.

Chang explained, “The Roost app allows a local agent or broker to configure a free ‘Real Estate’ Tab on their business page within minutes.  It leverages external API’s to bring in true local market real estate, schools and lifestyle data. This is just the first iteration of the tools we plan to offer.”

Here’s an example of what the app looks like on a Facebook Page:

Click on the tab and  you see promotional copy, links to other online marketing (blog), maps, market data and so on:

In email I asked Chang if he knew how many local realtors had Facebook Pages. He estimated that in the US there are about 300,000 (or somewhat more) agents on Facebook. The National Assn of Realtors claims about 1.3 million members, not all of whom are active. Chang guessed that the agents on Facebook represent perhaps 40% to 50% of the active agents in the US. 

Realtors have always been among the most interesting of SMBs. Many of them are aggressive, early adopters of new marketing methods.

Now, imagine a fairly complete digital marketing program for realtors that doesn’t involve a penny of media spending:

• A blog (feeds into FB, Twitter)
• Mobile app from Smarter Agent (local listings w/agent branding)
• Mobile optimized personal site/blog (somewhat optional at the moment)
• Enhanced Google LBC presence (w/video)
• Yelp enhanced profile
• Facebook Page like the one above 
• Online classifieds (mostly free)

This represents considerable effort, especially the blogging if it’s done regularly. And while there is money changing hands to create and launch all these tools, my point is there’s no “advertising” involved.

Agents still will undoubtedly do some traditional media ads, but in terms of online this could all be done — and be quite effective — without spending a dime on advertising. Most SMBs don’t realize how much can now be done online for free. If they did it would be potentially very scary for publishers and media companies.

Restaurant UGC Taken to a New Level in NJ

The culture of user-generated content and reviews, which has especially focused on the restaurant category, is taken to a new level with a proliferation of food bloggers in New Jersey according to an article in the NY Times:

“People come in with iPhones, and it might have seemed strange at first, but now we’re used to it,” Mr. Catlett said. “I’ve seen pictures of our food and of the waiters on the Internet and on Facebook.”

As he and other restaurateurs have found, the era of food bloggers — who routinely photograph a restaurant’s entrees, staff and décor — is upon us. And they seem to be especially active in New Jersey.

“I’ve been in the restaurant business my whole life in New York City, and in New York City restaurant bloggers don’t exist on the level they do in New Jersey,” said Michael Liristis, 34, the former manager and sommelier at Thalassa Restaurant in TriBeCa and at Kellari Taverna in Midtown. He is now a partner in and general manager of Nisi Estiatorio in Englewood, which opened in January 2009.

There’s not much more to say about this except this is a level of critical attention and scrutiny that will accelerate the boom or bust cycle of these businesses. There’s probably little or no need to actively “market” for these restaurants because they’re being so heavily covered.

‘Review & Win’ — or Not

Ever since the discussion during “Ask the Search Engines” this week at SMX West there’s been an ongoing debate about solicited or incentivized reviews. There are two sides here: the SMB who wants customers to post favorable reviews (Tweets and updates) and the publisher that is seeking content for its site. 

A couple of people pointed out to me the new Yellowbook contest that seeks to boost reviews:

The “big prize” approach is probably more effective than the per-review approach that was taken by Tribe.net and Insiderpages, among others (“five reviews for a Starbucks coffee card”). Superpages has done this type of thing, as have many others. It’s common on the publisher side. 

Someone pointed out that, given this contest, Yellowbook couldn’t turn around and do what Yelp is doing: frowning on incentivized reviews. Here’s the official Yelp discussion of this issue:

While we understand that there is a temptation to solicit reviews from your customers, it is not something we encourage. The most successful businesses on Yelp have had their reviews come organically. This is for a couple of reasons:

1. Potential customers can sometimes have an adverse reaction to a business that looks like it has solicited reviews.
2. Quite often those solicited reviews will be screened out (see above) based on the activity level of those users within the Yelp community.

And about screening of reviews:

Some reviewers are more credible than others. For the most part, users decide for themselves which reviewers they trust the most. We remove some of the guesswork by screening out reviews that are written by less established users. The process is entirely automated to avoid human bias, and it affects both positive and negative reviews. Since users can become more or less established over time, their reviews can disappear and reappear over time, as well. Either way, we never actually delete these reviews, and they can still be found on the reviewer’s personal profile page.

This system proves frustrating for some because it sometimes affects perfectly legitimate reviews. The flip side is that it helps protect against fake reviews from malicious competitors and disgruntled former employees. . . .

Local businesses will undoubtedly do the sort of thing that Yellowbook is doing on a smaller scale: “post a review on Yelp or Google or  become a fan on Facebook for a chance to win a free haircut.” This is exactly what Yelp wants to avoid — and if the reviews come from people who don’t normally post reviews — they’ll be removed or suppressed in all likelihood. 

But you can certainly understanding the thinking.

Meanwhile Over @Internet2Go

Here are stories from the past two days at Internet2Go:

• A Wave of ‘Kindle Remorse’ As iPad Approaches
• Smaato: iPhone CTRs on Ads Decline
• Taptu: Roughly 1/3 of Sites ‘Touch-Friendly’
• iPad Coming to Stores on April 3
• Mobile Becoming Focus for Social Networking
• Vlingo Adds Speech-enabled E-Mail and SMS to the iPhone: More Speechable Moments
• Gartner Has No Idea How Many iPads Will Sell
• Quantcast: Android Growing, iPhone Not
• Google: PC ‘Irrelevant’ in Three Years

8Coupons Makes Bid to Become Aggregator

There are essentially two angles in coupons: aggregator or sales channel. Either you’re bringing lots of deals and offers to consumers or you’re a direct sales channel acquiring offers from merchants. It’s going to be very rare for any single company to occupy both positions. 

I previously wrote about Yipit, which is aggregating deals from the various group buying vendors (e.g., Groupon). Now 8Coupons, which began in New York selling mobile coupons to SMBs is making a play to become an aggregator itself but with a bit of an angle . . . 

Here’s the PR pitch for the site now: 

With so many coupon, deal and discount web sites out there, consumers are on the verge of “Coupon Fatigue.”  There are so many sources for discounts and money saving information that it is hard to digest and utilize them all. 

That’s where http://www.8coupons.com/ comes into play with a One-Stop Shop for all the best deals near you.  8coupons aggregates coupons, sales, deal tips, and other discount related information from a variety of sources that include Valpak,MoneyMailer, Local Bloggers, “Groupon-like” Deal of the Day websites, Merchants themselves, Users themselves, etc., and displays them on 8coupons.com‘s sexy location-based (neighborhood level) map.  

8coupons’ geo-locator and mapping technology finds where you are and automatically populates 8coupons’ “Money Map” with the best, most popular, deals near you.  The8coupons deals algorithm figures out the “Top 8″ deals near you based on various metrics such as clicks, impressions, prints, texts, etc.

There might be a rare case where a non-aggregator can develop “brand” status. Groupon, because it’s the most well known of the lot, has a shot at this. 

But who do you think will win or what cluster of sites do you think will win in the now very crowded segment of largely anonymous companies offering deals to consumers and soliciting local business offers?

Q: Will Sprint Retain My Business?

I have two unlimited service plans from Sprint for myself and my wife. We pay in excess of $200 per month and we’ve been Sprint customers for a decade. We are the high-value post-paid customers that Sprint has been bleeding for the past couple of years.

I opted to stay with Sprint and bought the crap Palm Pre — sell your Palm shares now — instead of churning to AT&T to get the iPhone. Recently I discovered that T-Mobile offers the same service plan I currently have for two lines at $50 less per month.

It’s not the iPhone but I would be happy with the Nexus One, which is compatible with T-Mobile’s network. I’ve now talked to several Sprint reps and they’ve got nothing to offer me to retain my business. If T-Mobile pushed this plan aggressively on TV it would capture some new business. Indeed, it’s likely to capture mine.

Observing Sprint’s behavior is interesting from a customer service and retention standpoint. We’ll see how hard they work to keep me.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse should be matching T-Mobile’s pricing because Sprint is a “value carrier” and not really competing with AT&T or Verizon, which are positioned as the premium US carriers. Sprint hopes that WiMax will enable the company to boast about speed and compete with its network. However the advantage if it materializes will likely be short-lived.

Hitwise: MapQuest Still a Strong Query Term

The monthly travel report from Hitwise shows that MapQuest has settled in at number two, probably never to return to number one. However it remains a top brand and query, as the second chart indicates below:

This discrepancy between MapQuest’s number two position and the fact that its brand is still very heavily searched for is used by Foundem (one of complainants against Google) to make a case for “search neutrality” (oxymoron) with the FCC.