Local Search

today iam going to talk about local search. I would certainly agree with most observations that this is a tough market to crack given the specialization. Moreover, monetization is difficult in a segmented market as advertisers are going to be reluctant to spend unless they see significant ROI whch is tough since a local search engine can never attain critical mass leave alone attracting enough users . However, if specialization in vertical search can be successfully leveraged by horizontal search engines such as google or yahoo, we have a model where local search can benefit customers, advertisers and publishers by delivering scale as well as segmentation.

So lets begin with how local search could be defined. Unlike generic search (google), local search typically involves a user who is looking for information to make a decision. Something like a car buyer who wants to buy a car but is not very sure as to what car he wants to buy. So the user's decision could be influenced by a search engine on various dimensions. User could buy a economical car based on research of various models in the city( auto vertical), wait for a new model which is to roll out in a month in the city (news) or decide to buy a specific car because that car garnered the most positive reviews for safety (social) or go in for a hybrid car due to environmental issues (health) . So the user basically uses local search to do research that empowers him with information to make a sound decision. In order to make an appropriate decision the user needs to be able to have all the information that he needs at his/her fingertips.

Given the fact that most local search engines are specialized , the user would have to hop on to more than one site to get all the information needed. Which would mean an auto vertical , a news site , a health site and a review based social network. All this for information related to a specific object or keyword which is a car. So more the specialization in verticals the more the websites that need to be covered to make a judicious and well researched decision.

So what is the outcome of all this?? a search engine that can integrate all the verticals in a way that these are displayed on a single page so a user can easily navigate to verticals of interest and make a decision on a single site. Lets take Yahoo for example. The user performs a search on Yahoo for honda city and gets to a page where he/she sees information categorised according to various verticals but all related on the keyword cars. A section displays list of car retailers in the city while another section displays car reviews. Two more sections display honda city specific car deals in bangalore and the news regarding a latest honda model to be unveiled in Bangalore. By providing the user an intuitive way of understanding and assimilating information , Yahoo can convert a potential buyer into an informed buyer which would certainly result in a purchasing decision.


Now lets look at it from the advertiser's perspective. The potential for targeted advertsing is really high since advertisers get to a niche audience and still leverage Yahoo's scale. Moreover, whenever the user clicks a specific vertical (on a specific section), for a given keyword, relevant ads can be displayed . For eg., when a user clicks on the 'Health vertical' section for cars regarding environmental pollution, Toyota hybrid car ads for city based deals can get a pretty good CPM. Hence a combination of horizontal (keyword based) search and vertical segmentation can work wonders for advertisers.This is the value integrated local search can provide to customers, publishers and advertisers .


I believe the key to cracking the local search puzzle lies in understanding the gamut of use cases that need to be addressed, one of which being aggregation of relevant information from multiple verticals and putting it in perspective for the user so he/she can make an informed decision. Use cases could typically include one or more combinations of verticals such as reviews, maps, locations, news, finance etc. Possibilities are unlimited. However the key is an execution strategy that can integrate all these verticals based on the user keyword in such a way that experience for the user is seamless.

That is the power of local search!