Meet the Local Search Engines: reviews and tests
searchenginewatch.com reviews Yahoo! local, Ask Jeeves,Local search has been hot over the past year, with the major search engines jostling for eyeballs, offering new features for both searchers and advertisers alike.
A special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2004 Conference, December 13-16, Chicago.
Yahoo: "Business owners do not need to have a web site to be listed in Yahoo Local. The cost for an Enhanced Listing is a flat monthly fee. For more information about Yahoo Enhanced Listings, please visit http://listings.local.yahoo.com/. "
Ask Jeeves: has partnered with Citysearch for local information. "We have lots of descriptions from our editors. We have user-submitted content. And we have business-submitted content from our directory," said Palka. "So when you're in local search and those words are in the meta-data descriptions, you can be found in the natural results, too."
AOL: There are two ways a business can appear in AOL's local search results. Local content is pulled from AOL CityGuide and Yellow Pages. "If you represent a local business, we recommend going into the Yellow Pages listing and update your product there," said Pacsuzki. "We also do have an ambassador program to work with resellers and businesses having franchises in multiple locations. You can send us your data and we will integrate and distribute that data for free across all of our local properties."
Local Search ... Is your business ready?
forums.searchenginewatch.com local search forum thread. NB only one post, see above link for content and Google local discussed...
Chris Fillius blogs at The Search Lounge and looks "at each of the big four: Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN and Yahoo. A lot of the data these engines use comes from other sources, but I will focus on the user experience coming through each engine"
Fantastic review - works through each engines features for local searchresults, strengths and weakenesses...
Chris Fillius concludes: "Google and Yahoo are my preferred choices, with Google being the slight winner. Because I live in San Francisco and have so many other options for local information, MSN’s portal features, about which I will mention more later, are not particularly compelling. For other users, or for people from other cities, it very well may be different.
To provide more context, MSN is the only one of the four that is a full local portal. The other three are more search-based. So, depending on what you’re looking for you’ll want to use different ones (gee, what a surprise). I think Google offers the best search, but MSN’s browsing options could be useful. Yahoo stands out because they control their own data and in the long run that will set them apart. Ask didn’t really stand out to me in any significant way.
It’s interesting to think about the aforementioned strengths of each local engine because they accurately reflect each company as a whole. MSN is a destination company, Google is a search company, Yahoo is a destination/search/media company, and Ask is hanging with the others, but needs a little more oomph.
All four engines default to my saved search location, but Ask and Yahoo also keep a list of other recently searched locations for easy access. I find that feature useful because although I live in San Francisco, I also often search for information about Santa Cruz and San Diego, All four engines have useful help pages dedicated specifically to local."
posted by Jen @ 6:35 AM
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