Local Search - Defining “Near”

Local search is more than just matching websites to a location. A few years ago, I did a lot of research on local search, theorising and also building experimental local search engines. One of them was a mobile phone based search engine. It was perhaps a bit more advanced than a simplistic SMS based query search engine interface in that it took the user’s location into account in generating the results.

The quoting of an entire Google labs newsgroups post of mine from around that time by the operator of the searchtheowl website in a post on his blog shows how badly understood “local search” is, even today.

Localised and Local search is more than just stuffing a pile of URLs in a database and claiming that they are local because they are in the same country or even in the same county. The problem with local search is that the user wants to know what websites or resources are “near” to them. It is the definition of the term “near” that is at the heart of local search.

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Written by John McCormac on July 16th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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