If you can believe it, Marchex has simultaneously launched more than 100,000 local and vertical search sites representing over a billion pages. The move is probably unprecedented outside of a search index.
In May of 2006 Marchex acquired local search site OpenList and has used its technology assets and methodology to enable this launch. Before this acquisition, its domain portfolio business was essentially a collection of links to advertisers.
The rest of this post is at SEL. Here are my related posts about OpenList.
Screenwerk 
June 27, 2007 at 3:58 pm
This is extremely impressive. It’s a simple concept executed very well at an excellent time. Local search is where it’s at – as more and more small businesses start using the web more strategically to grow their business, there won’t be enough ‘local inventory’.
June 28, 2007 at 6:37 am
We agree with Peter Caputa. Many companies are seeing the benefits of having a large portfolio of urls that allows them to create a powerful network. It will be interesting to see how these on-line real estate moguls compete with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.
June 28, 2007 at 2:34 pm
As someone who has been in the domain industry for years, let me say that Marchex is *way* ahead of everyone else when it comes to local domains and putting content on it.
We’ve talked to quite a few parking companies, and most of them look absolutely confused and befuddled when talking about adding local data/content to geodomains. Perhaps one day, but for now, Marchex is far far ahead of the curve.
July 6, 2007 at 2:33 pm
[…] business will be tied to the n49 destination it appears. This makes it somewhat similar to what Marchex is doing with its 100K local/vertical domains and […]
July 10, 2007 at 4:39 am
Curious what people think about this comment about this post…I passed it to a friend and this is what he said:
“This is window dressing. Marchex is essentially a domainer…they raised over $150 million to buy out a domain portfolio from a guy in Hong Kong. They simply created a “portal” template based on keywords associated with the domain names and rebranded their domain portfolio as a network of local and vertical search sites. They are a major Yahoo resyndicator like Validclick.”
August 13, 2007 at 4:13 pm
[…] interesting and impressive about Marchex is that the company now has more than 100K locally oriented sites to support its forthcoming relaunch of OpenList.com as a consumer destination. Most sites launch […]
September 27, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[…] capabilities to make its domains into actual content sites. Fast forward to June of this year, Marchex launched 100,000 local and local-vertical sites using OpenList’s toolset and […]
November 20, 2007 at 7:09 pm
[…] is a geodomainer that has taken its portfolio and turned it into something quite engaging vs. most of these geodomains that have a kind of “hollow” feeling. There is […]
January 28, 2008 at 3:30 pm
[…] now has a massive local ad network in the form of thousands of domain sites that have been enhanced with OpenList content and functionality. Marchex also recently acquired […]