What Lies Ahead for Local Search Engine Technology?
What Lies Ahead for Local Search Engine Technology?: "What are some of the challenges search companies face with local search?[AF] Search engines are developing ways to disambiguate and adequately address location-specific queries. Geo-targeting Web search content, both organic and paid, requires search engines to better understand users and queries, inferring local intent by extracting geo-signals and leveraging implicit and explicit user profiles. Taking local search marketing services to market is also very different than selling paid listings to online businesses. The vast majority of local businesses still don't have a Web site, nor the time and expertise to invest in managing sophisticated auction-type listing campaigns."
PPC Overture and Google go one step further, suggesting forecasted traffic levels and cost estimates for specific keyword combinations, match types and bid amounts. In a yield-driven context, where content targeting gets more sophisticated and matching more scientific, Paid Inclusion and Paid Listing programs will eventually merge into more automated bid-for-traffic models. Ultimately, advertisers will target impressions by dictating an ROI level acceptable to them such as "8% over advertising spend". To meet these requirements, search engine marketers will increasingly rely on automation tools to target the right content to the right users at the right location at the right time..
Trends; One of the most significant developments currently underway in web search is the integration of search capabilities within a broad range of other services.
Let's look at commercial searches and informational searches; do you see the two becoming distinct categories?
[AF] No. A central theme behind classical information retrieval theories is that users are driven by an information need. More granular search log analyses over the past years have attempted to categorize queries as "transactional" (Commercial), "informational", and "navigational". The immediate intent behind "navigational" queries is to reach a particular site; "informational" queries aim at acquiring information assumed to be present on web pages; while "transactional" queries usually result in some activity such as an online purchase. Andrei Broder, while chief scientist officer at AltaVista in the late 90's demonstrated that queries at the time were roughly split equally among each category
search has a future on a cell phone?
[AF] Sending local content such as yellow page listings, directions, maps and business ratings to mobile devices just makes sense
posted by Jen @ 9:17 AM
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