Local search is about to go through a significant transformation. Today's launch of a new Yahoo Local points towards the future..

Communtity
Destination
Drill Down
Content Integration
Social Networking Seeds
Freshness Variables
Personalization
Ranking sort features
Mapping and review integration

... Just to name a few features.

The Y! Local move has given birth to the City Portal. errrr, Y! Local has resurected the city portal.

oh, the days of sidewalk, digital city, cityguides and more.

Is the city portal bound to be the front face of local search?

I am more interested in understanding how personalization and local search will be used together to supplement web search. ;)

hey rustybrick.

>>how personalization and local search will be used together to supplement web search.

yes, the trends and the assets support it. traditional web search is already supplimented by local search, and i think we will soon see a more personalized adaptation of that for explicitly local queries.

i think though that we need to need to broaded our perspective of personalization to include community and social networking elements.

personalization is traditionally based upon user data and personal behavior, Y has a deep history with personalization. when people search or evaluate, however, there are things that personalization can't do. specifically, it doesn't provide a decision based checks and balances.

internet technology enables connections and collective and trusted knowledge sharing. i know is seems a bit asbract but it is here right now. it will become the next generation of local search and doing it within the cofines of a sticky city portal with search as its root is just smart imo.

it doesn't provide a decision based checks and balances.

Right, social networking does provide that. So it is very exciting...

I am abusing that right now, until it gets too large for it to be abused easily.

But I am very excited for the future when all these work together, kinda like a 360 degrees approach (if you know what I mean).

>>******* that right now

isn't that what we do?

identify opportunity. take advantage of it. make money from it?

at this point in local barry, i call it contribution.

Thank you Justin!

Great to see they took care of a few things (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2381) since first launch. However, I still can't understand why users need to replicate ratings on multiple platforms. They should all be somehow semantically connected.

hey nacho!

>>replicate ratings on multiple platforms.

yep. this is an interesting issue.

currently there is different type of sharing happening. ask and g pull citysearch. g also pulls a number of other authoritative and specialized review sources.

y! is doing it organically and with tens of millions of registered users, can go at it alone, and push the personalization, networking, "smart card" approach to user generated content.

also several start-ups in the local search and social networking space are at it alone right now. some carving out review and rating specializations and others that are aggregating horizontally. eventually these groups will license the data to the majors, be bought, or combine.

there are also start-ups looking to standardize ratings, review, business data through personal data standardizations ~ so that it can remain constant and fluid within local search and social networking utilities.

Very interesting... thank you :)
there are also start-ups looking to standardize ratings, review, business data through personal data standardizations ~ so that it can remain constant and fluid within local search and social networking utilities.
Start-ups and old timers too.

One think I noticed on the ranking by rating based on this example (http://local.yahoo.com/results;_ylt=AiDDbPp4sSQlwv6KJmzlgOeHNcIF;_ylu=X3o DMTBra2VoaGppBF9zAzk2NjEzNzY3BHNlYwNzb3J0?stx=pizz a&fr=&city=La+Jolla&state=CA&zip=92037&uzip=92037&radius=10&dma=825&county=San+Diego&approxSpelling=&probability=10&fmap=67108858&ed=vN1qV6131Dx9n.i8HXElEOVJzXYdsxtuHLe1trHEG4j9yg--&sortby=drating), was the rating with 10 reviews + 5 stars is ranking at #10 as opposed to #1. Shouldn't they count the stars as 5 stars = 5 points x 5 users = 25 points .... or something like that??? rather than just ranking based on the 5 stars only. Then, using that same example, rank #1 is 8.14 miles away vs. rank #10 is 1.18 miles away, so even if there was a tie the closest one to you should rank higher... right?

I guess more tweaking is needed.... but, they're doing a fantastic job. Local search is all very exciting to me.