GeoSpot Places

GeoSpot now has dedicated home pages for countries, states/provinces, and cities. At the city level, there will be a highlight of major categories that are of interest to users. These include restaurants, beauty services, auto repair, and retail shopping. Right now they are just a list but will be fun to watch the dynamic change when reviews are open to public! Also at the city level is where current weather is displayed, along with link to Wikipedia for information. Nearby cities are also listed. You'll notice that nearby cities are also listed on individual business's information page.

Here's link to USA's Home Page.

And here are some sample links to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Honolulu.

Many countries, states, and cities have nice descriptions courtesy of our most loyal content contributors and GeoSpot employees. We welcome your description writeup! Send them to "support@geospot.com".

infoUSA partners with GeoSpot

Today infoUSA announces a partnership agreement with GeoSpot. This is great news for existing infoUSA customers to include GeoSpot's enhanced directory content. You can find a copy of infoUSA's press release on GeoSpot's corporate website.

Nice Video Introduction

Throughout February and March, a mini-documentary on GeoSpot's service is aired throughout United States on public television. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

What's Up with High Definition?

High Definition TV (HDTV)
According to Nielsen Co. estimates, more than 6.5 million U.S. households still are not ready. Today, Congress has announced the extension of the deadline from February 17 to June 12.

High Definition Local Search™
GeoSpot will offer this new fine-grained, "high-resolution" information service, appropriately called “High Definition Local Search™” (also “HD Local Search™” or HDLS™) or “Local Search in HD™”. Like HD video broadcasts, data used for local search must be "re-mastered" or “up-converted” to high definition so that a HD local search engine can use it to search for and find information that is more granular than what is currently available.

Stay tuned for this exciting release coming in 2010!

Challenges of the Local Search - The Good, The Bad, and The Disconnected

I have borrowed this sound bite line (with some modifications) from an article I read recently - "Left in the dark: How search fails at mobile local".

The author set out to buy a new headlight bulb for his BMW, and used the mobile local search applications from Google, MSN and Yahoo to find a store to buy it from. Needless to say, his experience was less than great. Stores found were not the closest ones, phones were disconnected, and many stores that he knew carry the product were not listed in search results.

In the post-iPhone (and Android, Blackberry, and soon Palm Pre) world with numerous free location-based applications with cool UI we tend to forget the two key aspects of a great search: rich data and their structure and sophisticated algorithms to find them.

Existing businesses are missing and closed ones are showing up as in operation. This is of course the nature of the beast - small businesses are being started and shut down so fast, especially in this economically challenging period and keeping up with that is not easy.

But even when the base data are up-to-date, there is simply only limited information to start with. Examples of missing data for up-to-date POIs include lists of services and products provided, operating hours for the business and for its specific services (when is the breakfast served?), and other characteristics like whether my kids will be welcome at that particular place.

The second challenge is creating an efficient way to organize all these data so they can be searched and found. Leading local search services may license a lot of data but they are likely in the format that is not searchable by consumers and to zero in on the target information is very laborious.

Until those issues are resolved, local search will remain a haphazard and often frustrating experience. Which is another way of saying that there is an opportunity for those who can solve these challenges.

Peter Braun