So I came across a post on Loki over at Screenwerk, and decided to take a closer look.

The premise is interesting - using wifi triangulation it is able to discern where a user is located. This is great for anything localized - eg local search. From our own experience a lot of users don’t even bother with entering in the ‘where’ field - what they expect to get, I still haven’t figured out.

So - you have to download the toolbar for it to work (thankfully with both Internet Explorer and FF versions). The toolbar takes a while to install, and for a desktop computer, it falls back to figuring out where you are based on IP. It would have made sense that, once realizing this was not a wireless computer, it would have prompted me for my address. Instead I had to initiate this process. Even more - I am very concerned about my privacy. I would have appreciated it if I could have just entered my ZIP code - instead it demends a street address.

The system is a bit sluggish - adding channel seemed to freeze up my computer, as did searching anything through the toolbar.

It works well. I went ahead and submitted iBegin Source to be included in their list of search engines.

But the real issue here is their new ‘Javascript API’. Using this API you can do ping the loki servers to figure out where a user is (provided he/she is using Loki). With the latitude/longitude of the visitor, you can easily serve up localized content.

But - it seems very muddled. The code itself is really simple - a few lines where you connect with the Loki server and extract this information.

But there are too many negatives. First of all - if Loki.com goes down, your site performance will degrade (due to the JavaScript call). I can trust Google will be up (for Google Maps) - but Loki?

Second of all - the restrictions seem rather arbitrary. We are given 10,000 location transactions per day - what is a transaction? Is one transaction one lookup (even if the user isn’t using Loki). Or is it only a transaction when the user is using Loki?

Lastly - the badges page. Provided we can get over the previous two issues, if I want a user to utilize Loki, I don’t want to send them to a common page. They are my visitor - I don’t want to be sending them to a competitor’s site. For the badges to work, they must provide a ‘clean’ landing page with minimal distractions. A link at the end saying ‘Visit Loki.com for more location-enabled sites’? Fine. More than that is too much.

At the end of the day, what I am curious about is - how many people are actually using Loki? Getting iBegin Source to work with the toolbar took all of 2 minutes - just do a check if latitude/longitude are set. But utilizing the JavaScript API requires a lot more work - are there enough Loki users to make it even worthwhile? While I hate to use those online ranking sites, the early indications are not so good.