Quick News On The Local Search Front

Local.com (LOCM) buys PremierGuide for a fire sale price of $2 million.

"Premier has directories on over 350 sites including Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., GateHouse Media, Inc. and Washington Post."

Valley Yellow Pages goes digital in 2007 with the launch of MyYp.com. I have to say this is a terrible debut for the company already late to the digital table. The search is clunky, the layout is terrible and look at this messy page. It looks like they simply scanned their own pages. Simply amazing this is the best they could come up with. Disappointing frankly and makes me think they should consult with the people at Local.com?

More On Local.com (LOCM)

The stock market finally took notice of the patent award announcement on June 25th due to a blog post on Seeking Alpha on June 29. The stock responded by rising roughly 80% .

Today the company announced they were awarded an additional patent that may hold a deeper meaning for the financial future of the company and indeed all paid local search.

Pay attention to the last line below;

Quotes from Local.com CEO Heath Clarke via From Sys-Com Media;

"In our view, the burgeoning free 411 marketplace is being underwritten by a variety of advertising supported models. Our patent 7,200,413 is directly related to a referral advertising model such as pay-per-click or pay-per-call listings, which are delivered to consumers as a result of an enhanced directory assistance inquiry or local search, where the results can be provided to consumers via many mobile channels, including voice," said Heath Clarke, Chairman and CEO, Local.com.

"Our recently announced patent 7,231,405 was related to the methods used to deliver our highly relevant organic search results. Patent number 7,200,413 is complementary to our local search patent in that it provides us with intellectual property coverage for what's now a widely accepted monetization method -- pay-per-referral -- within the directory assistance marketplace. Local.com believes that ad-supported directory assistance is the future of 411 services in the U.S., and we look forward to working with a variety of companies to deliver innovative new products and services to the marketplace," continued Clarke. "We encourage directory assistance and free 411 companies that are interested in using our intellectual property to enter into licensing agreements with Local.com."

That could be industry changing. The stock responded today by moving up another 55% as of this posting.

Oddly none of the prominent local search marketing industry writers have chimed in with opinions on this second patent yet.

Local.com Announces New Local Search Patent

I don't know how it came to be that I find reading local search patents interesting. This patent issued to Local .com contains some interesting passages and pretty fantastic claims;

"Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) have been used in web sites that provide some local search capabilities. Such conventional web sites organize information according to location and store it into a relational database. Online yellow pages, such as Superpages for instance (www.superpages.com), store local business information in a relational database and utilize SQL language for searching. The database contains business name, address, and telephone data. The web page content of a business is not searchable since it is not stored in the relational database. Thus conventional services such as online yellow pages are not a true local search engine."

Small business isn't served well by the major search engines, paticularly the way Google Pagegank measures the value of a website.


"Other conventional systems provide a ranking of search results in relation to the user supplied search words. Ranking web pages is an important part of conventional search engine operation. As an example, a typical user tends to provide one or two keywords to a conventional search engine. As a specific example, the keyword "java" by Google returns 65,800,000 web page hits. The same keyword "Java" by Yahoo returns 53,900,000 records. There are so many hits with conventional web sites that a user is unable to realistically visit the web pages of every one of such hit. Using conventional search engine technology, any web document containing "java" will be included in the hits. The first hit of Google is http://java.sun.com. The first hit in Yahoo is http://www.sun.com. Both Google and Yahoo provide results that indicate java is a programming language from Sun Microsystems. However, the word java has many other meanings. People that are not familiar with java programming language would be surprised at the search results. The reason why do Google and Yahoo rank the java programming language first instead of a coffee shop is because of the ranking algorithm used by these web search engines. As an example, a ranking system called PageRank is considered the foundation of Google. U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999 entitled "Method for node ranking in a linked database" described a page rank system used by Google. The entire content of U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999 is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. The PageRank system calculates recursively the rank score of web page by looking at its linked web pages--that is, those pages that link to (i.e., that contain a hyperlink that reference the URL of) the page being ranked. A higher ranked web page has a higher weight in the ranking equation. Because of the way in which the PageRank algorithm operates, some companies hire so called search engine marketing experts to build web pages linked with each other to boost the score by increasing the number of remote web pages that reference a particular companies web site.

For a small business's web site that has only a few sites linked to it, or for businesses that do not have the money to boost PageRank by search engine marketing experts, search engines that use page ranking provide results that contain the small business site referenced deep into the search results, often resulting in consumers missing those small business sites. Since the small business web site's PageRank is low, even if it can be searched by a traditional search engine, the results indicating the small business web site will be hundreds of pages away in the search results. Embodiments of the invention significantly overcome this problem using a unique ranking system that incorporates geographic location as well to rank a page based on other pages of other sites that are local to the page being ranked.

Another system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,282,540 entitled "Method and system for providing a web-sharable personal database", the entire contents of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein, details a system for providing a web-sharable personal database with proximity searching capability. The system described in this patent is not a local geographic based search engine. Instead, it focuses on create a personal database and stored address information in database. Furthermore, it did not address the challenge of mixing the power of conventional search engine with geographical awareness."

I confess I don't know how this makes Local.com any more important than it was yesterday. What is clear is Local.com feels the heat from the Geomas lawsuit.
For the record I like Local.com. I use it and I root for it, I even own some stock. I like the David v. Goliath stories in life, cheering the underdog.

Natpal, "Serving Local Merchants"

Greg Sterling wrote about Natpal recently. I took a look and found some positives and negatives.

From Natpal;

"Natpal.com was originally incubated at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, and is now headquartered in New York City. Natpal.com has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local merchants who are transitioning their marketing budgets online...."
"...Natpal, by 2009, will have a diversified product enabling businesses to effectively interact with customers via the web. Natpal's flagship product, adStation, will be offered globally as a web-based application, allowing businesses to automate and enhance their pay for performance advertising."

I like their before and afters customer website profiles. They do pretty decent makeovers. I followed some of their client testimonials and can't really see anything special local placement service provided. One client, Philadelphia restaurant is not optimized well for local at all. It's not profiled on any of the local search sites, local directories or IYP's.

Another profiled client, a small charter fishing company is not found on any variation of a Google Maps search. You really can't say you serve local business unless you cover the basics like Google Maps/Local.

I get the impression they are really gunning for the introduction of their "adStation" application. Maybe this product will distinguish them.

Local search marketing is a distinct specialty. Properly done it requires hands-on personal representation. The local landscape is too fragmented, too detailed with too many options for an automated service to cover.
Natpal will need a crew of trained search specialists to do the necessary work of customer relations and data input to become serious local search marketing providers. A look at their careers page shows they know this. Within one of the job descriptions we see some insight to their thinking.

"Industry Description:

Local Search is considered the new frontier in paid search marketing, the fastest growing area of both technology and advertising and the key driver of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Over $100 billion is spent on local advertising in the U.S alone; to date, very little has transitioned online. A significant opening exists to devise, build, and monetize this opportunity within the next 2-4 years.

I agree the next 2 to 4 years is the time to build a local search platform. Once the herd starts moving it will turn to a stampede. Natpal should be ready!