Google and AltaVista test local search

(September 23 2003) Q: What's the next big thing in internet searching? A: Localized search.

The search engines are now testing technologies that let you narrow your search to one local geographic area, being that a city, a county or a state.

Given that more and more local shops and services build an online presence, the need for such search facilities should be clear: they could supplement or even replace ads in local newspapers and yellow pages. By using such a search engine you could find your local shoe repair shop, buy tickets to the cinema, get the latest regional news etc.

Google has launched a test facility for local search at its Google Labs site. There is one search field for the regular search query and one field where you can type in a US address, city & state, or a US ZIP code.

The result pages includes regular search results, similar to a regular Google page. What is more interesting is that Google adds a map from MapQuest above these results, and on this map it marks where the various shops, services or institutions are located. Try a search for "cinema" in Mountain View, California (ZIP code 94043) to see what we mean.

Unlike Gigablast, Google does not experiment with "geo-sensitive" metatags when determining the geographical focus of a web page. Google says that they are analyzing the entire content of a page to extract hints or, what they call "signals," about the geographic nature of a page.

Overture is also testing localized search. It has already run a test site for a geo-targeted version of its pay-per-click text ad search engine (the site has now been closed). Moreover, Overture's AltaVista team has for some time worked on a localized search engine a bit similar to the one presented by Google.

Like Google AltaVista is working on revised search algorithms and other ways of identifying the locality of the various webpages. AltaVista is also spending quite a few man hours on how to present search results of this kind. The trick is to give searchers access to geo-targeted results without confusing them.

One challenge that faces both Google and AltaVista is how to include search results from the "hidden web", i.e. data that is not included on regular web pages, but that can be found by searching online databases, including yellow pages and other directories.

Very often the search engine companies will have to negotiate with each and every one of these data providers to be allowed to include search information. If you want to include such data on a world wide basis, you will have to do a lot of negotiations!

Will localized search be a success? We believe so, provided that the search engines actually manage to deliver good results.

The main challenge will be beating the spammers. We can already envision spammers producing a never ending number of doorway pages targeting every single county, city and municipality on this globe. The market for lists of geographical locations will be very lucrative, indeed!

Google test local search (CNET)
Google search by location FAQ.