New research suggests that internet users are increasingly relying on search to find local service businesses, potentially taking mind-share away from traditional print yellow pages and classified advertising.
If you're looking for hard data about the world of search engine marketing, arguably the best single source of metrics is MarketingSherpa's annual
Local online marketing firm WebVisible conducted an online survey this past August regarding Internet usage to find a local service business. The survey used Nielsen//NetRatings' online panel and asked about behavior within the past 90 days....
Idearc is the newly spun off parent of local search provider SuperPages.com. The company started trading today on the NYSE. The SuperPages brand, which survives the spin-off, will continue to publish Verizon yellow pages. SuperPages has been the...
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint has launched mobile (local) search has part of a broad new strategic relationship with Microsoft, "allowing its subscribers to use their phones to look up information on local businesses and events and...
Google has expanded its mobile ads beta test beyond the U.S., U.K., Japan and Germany to eight more countries: France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, China, Ireland, India and Australia. Ads appear above and below Google search results on mobile...
If you're not aware of it, Loki is one of the more interesting developments in local search. It's a downloadable toolbar from Skyhook Wireless, which initially launched in April, 2006 and has recently been upgraded. (The technology actually works...
HotPads is a map-based rental housing search site. The site has launched new heatmaps that contain interesting demographic information showing such data as age, income, percentage of renters and average rent. For example, here's per capita income...
InfoSpace has launched kid-friendly search engine Zoo.com, which provides web and news search. Intentionally there is no image search at launch. The content comes from Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia with news content from ABC News, Fox News and...
When Microsoft launched its Live Local/Virtual Earth 3-D platform earlier this week, the memorable quote from Virtual Earth GM Stephen Lawler was, "It's the beginning of the 3-D Web." As a factual matter that statement may not be entirely...
Tomorrow Microsoft will bring dramatic 3-D mapping to the browser window. Windows Live is set to launch photorealistic 3-D imagery for the "urban core" of 15 U.S. cities: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las...
When "human-powered" search engine ChaCha launched in September it was a great idea with very flawed execution. The site offers algorithmic search, but also IM-chat based search with actual people in real time. Here's my previous post on ChaCha....
News aggregator and search engine Topix.net announced a new round of funding in which its newspaper owners, Gannett, Tribune Co. and McClatchy, have invested $15 million in the site to help further develop it. According to Hitwise, Topix has been...
The NY Times has a long and relatively interesting article on geotagging images and mapping. It primarily discusses Flickr and, to a lesser degree, Google Earth and Picasa and other services such as TripTracker. The article also goes into the...
CNN reports that the Internet has now crossed a significant milestone; there are 100 million operating websites. The Web's growth has been accelerating: "There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England, began keeping track...
One could plausibly argue that it's crazy to do anything in the general ("horizontal") search marketplace. But new engines continue to launch. The latest, having been in semi-stealth mode for the past several weeks, is Zotspot. Zotspot is a...
Compete, Inc. is a B2B firm that conducts consumer-oriented research for large clients. Now the company has released SnapShot, a free tool that anyone can use. It operates like Alexa or Google Trends to display relative traffic, as well as...
Pontiac had a much celebrated TV ad in which the viewer was invited to “Google” its then-new Solstice convertible, but an ad for Mazda came up among the sponsored links. Here's Danny's earlier post on that episode. Now Mazda is at it again with...
As the latest in an ongoing series of studies that capture the evolving and complex nature of consumer behavior today, Yahoo yesterday released findings from a joint study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study was fielded...
In writing about the launch of Google Custom Search Engine, I neglected to mention a couple of other companies doing similar things. The first one omitted from my post was consumer-focused customized search engine Optevi. Optevi allows users to...
