I just finished reading The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. It was truly energizing.
My senior project for the Ball State Entrepreneurship Program was to write a business plan and pitch it to a board of venture capitalists for approval. I did my plan on creating an Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) company called Munciepages.
John’s book reminded me why I’ve always had this burgeoning feeling about internet search. Google and Yahoo rewrote the rules about search and launched billion dollar companies. But they went about it in two distinctly different ways.
Yahoo was started by David Filo and Jerry Yang as a self-edited guide to the internet, called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” John details in the book that Yahoo has always had a human-editing bend on indexing. In stark contrast stands Google. Started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a backlink analyzer, their search engine has from day one been based on computer algorithms and advanced engineering.
So what?
Human-editing is impossible to scale indefinitely. And as of yet, computers still can’t provide opinions or process context like humans. Based on Battelle’s analysis I would argue that the perfect search solution would be a combination of the two. And to control the scale issue I think one can look to create a limited scope. Local is the solution.
I truly believe that the next revolution in search will be local. The yellow pages industry is a 15 billion dollar industry. Classified advertising is another 15 billion dollar industry. The business model for local news is dying a quick death. Yet more and more people are turning to the web.
Google, Yahoo, YellowPages.com and the hundreds of other local directory websites are all going about local search the exact same way. They get data from InfoUSA then ask business owners to log in and add advanced data. This doesn’t work. Google and Yahoo can append crawled data to business listings and sites like Yelp.com are empowering consumers to add content. Again, this is not enough.
To get local businesses to shift advertising dollars online I believe that someone is going to have to hold their hand and help them. Prove value first then show them how to make the most out of using the web.
URBaCS will be launching a new solution to solve the local search problem on August 1st. Stay tuned for more information. And thanks John Batelle for reminding me why I spent an entire year of my life researching local search.