I was struck by a statement that Marchex EVP Matthew Berk made to me during a recent discussion about the company’s new SMB reputation management tool. I’m loosely paraphrasing but he said that it was difficult for him to admit (given that he built OpenList) but that local search was essentially a “solved problem.”
I was pretty surprised to hear Berk say this. But as I reflect I have to admit that there’s a way in which it’s true. If we define “local search” as directional queries for basic business data (name, address, phone number) and even category-based queries (e.g., “window repair, Millbrae”) I would tend to agree with Berk’s assessment.
The trusted recommendations, reviews and “word of mouth” part of this process is not yet “solved” or definitively concluded. In other words the local battle now may be shifting to social media or community development on local sites. Indeed, there’s lots of room for social media sites and what I’ve called “social directories” like Yelp to play. And there are clearly some “vertical” opportunities that are either wide open or relatively still open: home improvement, legal, medical, child care, among others. In the realm of local product search and local inventory data, there’s still a relatively “greenfield” there too, although there are big barriers to entry.
But Google is pretty clearly the dominant player in “local search.” The company might not have “won” but if it hasn’t it will continue to be dominant for the foreseeable future. (We’ll see what Bing tries to do here to shake things up. And what about AOL’s allegedly big push into local?)
Source: TMPDM-comScore (2009), n=4,000
Before everyone gets upset — although please dispute what I’m saying if you disagree — let me say that there are exceptions and standouts that one can point to. There will continue to be a range of players with national-local reach that have strong visibility and usage: Yelp, Citysearch, Craigslist, some of the YP publishers and a few others. It remains to be seen how Facebook, Twitter and MySpace engage with local. MySpace has implemented classifieds and local 1.0. Facebook also has classifieds and lots of local businesses using it, but has not yet truly seized the opportunity that exists there. Twitter search (and its variants) may yield some valuable local recommendations but that does yet truly exist. And as I said I also believe there will be continuing innovation in vertical segments.
Enough qualifying . . .
The part of the whole local equation that is definitely not solved in my mind is what might be called “local discovery.” I don’t know what I don’t know. This bleeds into recommendations and “local search” of course. But there’s a ton of stuff going on that I don’t know about and that I might be interested in: new businesses opening, local deals and specials, things to do and events, activities, etc. People have so far taken an Amazon-like approach to this space: those who looked at restaurant X also viewed restaurant Y. But that’s very narrow. And there are events sites/networks such as Zvents and Eventful. But the function that used to be performed mostly by the local print newspaper (e.g., trusted recommendations, upcoming events, things to do, etc.) is not well served online.
There are the email newsletters such as Daily Candy and Flavorpill, but I mostly ignore them because I have too much email to deal with.
We’re starting to see some interesting things in mobile emerge that try to address this “discovery” problem. But there are no great apps in this category at this point.
This entire “discovery” subject is quite elusive and unwieldy so I’m not sure whether we’ll see anything “horizontal” that addresses it. More likely are vertical and topic-specific approaches (maybe demographic approaches too). But there’s an opportunity here around “local discovery” that I don’t believe is being exploited well by anyone — yet.
Yahoo!’s interest in beefing up local news and location-based content should lead it to consider buying Zvents. Yes, Yahoo! owns events destination Upcoming. However Zvents has more data and an ad/distribution network that includes many of Yahoo!’s newspaper partners.
Dylan Fuller and Simon Baptist have put together a very interesting event in London on November 3. It’s called the 
The 
Events is an important but historically neglected area of local search, previously the almost exclusive province of newspapers and printed weeklies. Now there are a range of startups and more established sites providing local events information. They include 
Screenwerk 
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