I partook in a small but interesting discussion a while ago about how bad local data is out there. Not just bad, but also impossible to clean up.

I’ve been taking the time lately to go back through iBegin and ’scrub’ our data. As it happens, the raw data we purchase is far from perfect (duplicates galore, mis-categorizations, etc). It is essentially a ‘risk’ we take. But that isn’t the end of it - even franchises suffer from big problems when it comes to local data.

Case in point: McDonald’s. You cannot get a more recognizable name. But do note its name - McDonald + ‘ + s. Not McDonalds, not Mc Donalds, not MacDonalds, or the other dozens of varieties.

So while we went through, pass-by-pass (basically you create rules, ‘run’ the rules on the data, tweak the rules, and then re-run) through our data, I wondered what my esteemed competition was upto.

Looks like not much. Checking them out:

• InsiderPages. IP couldn’t even handle the single-quote. It did local McDonald’s, so I guess we give it a pass
• Yelp. I found McDonalds, McDonald’s, McDonalds Restaurant, and other variations. A few of the clickable links had a link to the official website, but most did not.
• Google Maps. A bigger mashup than all the rest combined. No standardized name (Whats a Restrnt), some are categorized, most aren’t. No link to the official website.
• TrueLocal. A few results, various spellings, no link to the official site except for the first link. Interestingly if you click on the first result, it shows you many more McDonald’s listings. Those are accurate, but why aren’t they in the default search results?
• Yahoo Local. Correctly spelled and all results link to the main website. Perfect

Really my point here (amidst the connections in my brain) is that if companies cannot even get the data on the largest franchise in the world right, how are they going to cover data on small businesses?

Its a mind-boggling problem.

Andy Sack, the blogging CEO of Judy’s Book posted today about what Yelp did to whip Judy’s Book. Because lets be fair - it was a whipping.

Three main points, each very interesting on its own:

Catered to a younger audience
While this is an easier route, it means some heavy skewing. And you can already see the effects of that. A lot of the reviews are written specifically to get ‘coolpoints’. A lot of the reviews read like stories, of which 1% can be considered a ‘review’ and the other 99% a journey of epic proportions. The other issue at hand is the fickleness of that crowd. Friendster felt it, and everyone is wondering if Facebook is going to feel it. Then again, maybe it is only the younger crowd that will ever really contribute (in large masses) to sites like Yelp. This isn’t to rag on Yelp, just that I think that strategy can be dangerous. But it might be the only one.

Focused on restaurants
This just makes sense. There is no activity (outside of their house) that a person does that is more varied than eating out. You can find a favorite cafe. A favorite club. But even with a favorite restaurant - you look. You flirt, and you tempt. We can have a monogamous relationship with almost anything (again applying to outside of the house) except eating at a restaurant.
So umm - back to the topic. More than Yelp being smart, I have to ask - what the hell was the competition doing? Catering to plumber reviews?

Out-marketed
This is where Yelp does deserve its dues. The site is exceptionally well put together, and has great cheeky humor spread throughout the site. Judy’s Book felt motherly, Insider Pages felt corporate, and Yelp felt friendly. Well done Yelp, well done!

Andy’s final point is interesting - can Yelp (or InsiderPages or anyone else for that matter) properly monetize social directories? Personally - I don’t see why not. If MySpace or Facebook (Friendster is suppoused to break even within the next few months) can do it, why not Yelp or IP? The audience at MySpace is highly fragmented and relatively cash-poor. The people on Yelp are local (and thus far better targeted) and are interested in going out (and spending their relatively cash-rich wallets). Someone give me a good counter-argument.

Then again, our own iBegin is trying to be search-first, social-network second. That in itself is a different ballpark, with headaches galore. I will talk about some of the challenges in upcoming posts.

So today (last night for me) Boorah launched, a site I had recently pointed out was cached all over Google and had its blog broken. We don’t see many (credible) local search sites launched anymore, so lets take a gander with some few thoughts:

1. The design is ugly. If it was slightly uglier, you could give Craigslist a run for that money
2. Clicking on basic search brought me to this page - huh?
3. Having never lived in NYC or SF, I am unfortunately unable to ascertain the strength of its results …
4. The assortment of reviews is pretty cool. I do *not* like how they use redirect links (dammit if you are going to essentially lift content, give it a damn direct link). It also makes no sense how they are ordering the reviews - definitely not based on date.
5. Because they give no breakdown of information on the reviews, their overall rankings for food, ambiance, and service could be made up. No proof, not good enough.
6. The design is seriously horrible. I say this after clicking on add tags - the inline dialog box looks like its from Mac OS X. Someone point them to 37signals asap-like.
7. The Buzz is really just # of reviews. Why call it Buzz?
8. Whats open now is busted for me. It showed places opening up at noon in SF (and one hour ahead of SF, it is 8:57 am locally).
9. The smart search is cool but busted. Searching for ‘open kitchen’ brought in results for lively also. Clicking on the links didn’t work - dead links.
10. ‘People who liked this restaurant also liked …’ is pretty damn cool. Again, since I don’t know these places, I cannot reflect on its accuracy.
11. The speed of search (which matters a lot to me) is too slow.
12. The ‘blog link’ on the bottom goes to http://www.boorah.com/blog/. How about someone do some cleanup and point the other two blog URLs to the correct one.

I like the idea, but I am not impressed with the execution. Too many odd bugs - if I found all those in 20 minutes, they need a QA team (or a QA part-time-person) asap.

My feeling? A tech play that will try to get snapped up like OpenList.

Half of the time, when a site says it is ‘coming soon’ all they have done is change their index page. Some of them are so simplistic that while their actual frontpage is index.php, they have uploaded an index.html to hide it.

Most don’t do that, but the site itself is quite accessible. What they forget is what a fearsome beast Google is.

Case in point: I read about a local aggregator called Boorah launching. I clicked on to their site and saw a coming soon page. Incidentally they had PageRank. Which can only mean … Google has crawled your site and has cached pages ready for viewing. Clicking on a link does give you a ‘coming soon…’ but the cache pages show the site before it launches.

Speaking of the actual site … what was interesting was that they claim (can’t say for myself) to be able to ascertain, through the reviews, what other restaurants are of similar likability. That is actually pretty damn cool if it works right.

Also a friendly recommendation to Boorah: know where your links go. I found a link to http://blog.boorah.com/, but it goes nowhere. I did eventually find your blog is actually at http://www.boorah.com/alphablog/, but guess where it links to? Yep - http://blog.boorah.com/

Beyond what Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask (I’m including CitySearch) offer, there are a lot of other local search/review websites. To name the notable:

• InsiderPages Funded by IdeaLab, an incubation company whose previous successes include Overture
• Zipingo (owned by Inuit, makers of Quicken)
• Judy’s Book - VC funded, I am including them here because a large majority of their traffic/base is still based on adding reviews for local establishments
• Yelp - VC funded, part of the ‘PayPal alumni creations’
• TrueLocal - owned by GeoSign, a well established internet company
• Local.com - publicly traded company

So we have six websites, all duking it out with the four big boys of the internet. And as almost always happens in a fragmented market, problems are starting to rear.

InsiderPages just went through some big layoffs. Zipingo really hasn’t made much of a splash, and with Google’s recent partnership with Inuit, may just be pushed aside. Judy’s Book was forced to change its plan to survive (but still has great value in its existing review-base). Yelp is the golden boy, chugging along, but has raised over $15 million. TrueLocal admittedly a different breed - it is actually sells its data. And local.com - well they seem to have already started the acquisition game, picking up soUno to build up its revenue stream.

The fact that none of them are profitable (except for TrueLocal) will lead to some casualties in the upcoming year. My prediction is that by the end of the year, only Yelp, TrueLocal, and Local.com will still exist. My prediction for the other three:

• InsiderPages - the management at IdeaLabs cannot be happy. They are used to getting press - a lot of it. Yelp has stolen any thunder the site has, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Yelp comes in and acquires the site. It does have over $10 million laying around …
• Zipingo - eliminated. As Google and Inuit’s partnership bears fruit, and Zipingo’s lackluster traction is considered, it will be axed.
• Judy’s Book - won’t survive. All their goodwill, all their traffic, and all their SEO benefits have been from local reviews. Alexa already shows a steady decline in pageviews, and so people just are not sticking around. As the value of their reviews diminishes, I see the site drying up. Sorry Andy, I just don’t see it happening

Others are launching - ie Mojo Pages. I don’t see them surviving long either - their blog focuses a lot on accounting and usability, but absolutely none on actually reaching mass market (which is the problem IP and Yelp really suffered from). I predict a quick demise for them also.

One of the sites we own is Local Moa. It is a New Zealand local search we did as a bit of a test-bed for some implementation techniques.

I recently got an email from a visitor of that site. To quote:

hi,
I would like to order chicken
thats 1 box of boneless chicken breasts and 1 box of thighs with legs

My address is:
26 xxxxxxxxxx st
xxx xxxxxx
ph xxx 2231
or xxx 7261

THANKS

Another one went like so:

Dear Sir / Madam ,

I hope you can assist.

I need some general information. I lead a very busy lifestyle (work and
look after two children) am overweight , tend to eat quite healthly , have
always exercised , find myself tired quite a lot of the time, concentration
tends to vary , quite affected by PMS.

Can you help ? could this be down to diet or am I taking to much on ?

Please gice me a call xxxxx-xxxxxx .

Kind Regards

xxxxxxx

Go see what the contact page looks like.

This of course is a small sampling - I have resumes, love letters (okay, really just one letter), booking inquiries, and so forth. What is really stunning is the amount of personal data thrown in (including a credit card number once!)

The internet is still very confusing to end users. End users that include small business owners.

Interestingly enough - iBegin, with roughly 10x the traffic, gets 1/10th the amount of such emails. I wonder why?

Recently the three leaders in the online local search field (Yelp, InsiderPages, and Judy’s Book) have gotten a lot of attention. With them (and ultra-niche sites like BackFence) laying off people left and right, the trumpet has started to sound. Local search does not work!

What a load of poppycock.

Local search does work. Hiring an excessive number of people without any clue about revenue does not work. And that applies to any industry.

Lets look at InsiderPages. Techcrunch reported that IP let go of 2/3rds of their staff recently. To pause for a second - what were those 2/3rds doing? Searching for ‘pizza - Pasadena, CA’ (their hometown) yielded 13 CPC links all driven by Google. They had two local sponsors for what is one of the most coveted keywords in their hometown. Clicking on one of those local sponsors was brutal - take a look at this. If I am a local sponsor, why the hell are there six CPC links on my listing? Going back to their search results - at 1600×1200 resolution, the first non-paid link was halfway down. Didn’t the entire Google vs Yahoo battle prove that jamming advertising down our collective throat is not a good idea? Humbug!

At least InsiderPages is going for cost-cutting. Their map results use images directly from the Google server. Impressive!

Judy’s Book decided to go and become a shopping site. Pretty much immediately after the change, two things happened:

1. Andy Sack (their CEO) posted that they just had their highest revenue day.
2. A lot of angry members stated how much they hated the changes. A lot of venom was especially saved for the City Editor program.

While a lot of people are throwing accolades at Judy’s Book for getting out and surviving, I would say the jury is still out there. A lot of people were (are?) coming to Judy’s Book for reviews and other information. Only after 6-12 months will the full impact of their change in direction be noticeable. Personally I find Andy Sack’s blog very interesting - he is very open about his mistakes. It takes guts to do that.

Lastly, and the darling of them all - Yelp. This is a company that has gone through $6 million and needs another $10 million. They are definitely doing something right - a lot of people are registering there and talking. But has anyone actually looked deeply into it? A lot of the chatter there goes on in their ‘Talk’ section, which is just a forum. If there is anything difficult to monetize on the web, it is a forum. And has anyone read the reviews? They are more like popularity-contest stories and less like insightful comments about an establishment. I could be jealous, but that site reminds me of MySpace.

A lot of people will argue that millions of dollars are needed to gain market share and mindshare and so forth. Last I heard, Yelp claimed 1.5 million unique visitors a month (this from the TechCrunch article). InsiderPages was at roughly 1 million. To put that into perspective, iBegin, which covers one major city (Toronto), one capital (Ottawa), and one really teeny-tiny city in Michigan (Kalamazoo) does over 250,000 unique visitors a month. It seems the money being spent on marketing isn’t being spent very well.

What’s my point? There is a lot of waste. Its like evolution - the weak are being eliminated. There are many local-oriented directories that are doing very well for themselves. The problem is that the current crop of local search just doesn’t cut it.

The local market has started to heat up. As Google and Yahoo and MSN go searching for the next ‘big thing’, a lot of focus has been put on local search. This focus is not necessarily good when you are one of the smaller guys, trying to compete in this very space.

One company that was recently called out for its marketing behavior was MerchantCircle. The story is a bit convoluted, but the main problem cited by many was the highly aggressive marketing tactics used by MerchantCircle. The company went ahead and apologized, and I shrugged this off as an ‘oops’ learning experience that every company goes through this.

That was until I saw this.

The basic gist: unless you come and signup with us (at which point you control all reviews), we will allow all libelous statements.

“This lumber is sponsored by Al Qaeda.”

“Plus when I got my insurance, he gave me the herpes! If you really want good insurance, I suggest you go elsewhere. Fo realz.”

Considering the previous complaints was that the MC telemarketing call went along the lines of ‘You have received negative comments at Merchant Circle’, it seems like MC welcomes (vicious) negative comments.

As a layman user, if I visited that site and saw such ridiculous reviews, I would never visit the site again. Then again, maybe that is why no one is listening.