You are always welcome here!

The hindsight and experience do change the reading thats for sure. You see something that doesn’t make sense, or you see it twice and then you go back and see that it was planned for right along…

Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts on these patents and whitepapers, Mike. Local is going to become more and more important than ever, especially with the explosive growth of people connecting to the Web with smartphones.

I agree with you on revisiting patents – I find new things in them with the advantage of hind sight, and a fresh pair of eyes, too.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the Loci 2009 series.

@Earlpearl,

Thank you very much for your kind words, Dave. I really appreciate hearing your experiences with many of the ideas that have been expressed in the patents and papers.

The statement from the Yahoo whitepaper that only 50% of queries with Geo Intent included specific locations sounds pretty reasonable (though I would love to actually see their data). I do think that’s something that people involved in paid search should take serious note of.

I’ve had personal experience with the first topic, “Local Intent in Search”, for years. We have one local small business site that additionally ranks highly for the #1 industry term, and a variety of the secondary industry terms. This has been the case for years. Additionally, for years it ranked #1 in Yahoo for the industry term (no local modifier) and Yahoo somehow didn’t include the Local Terms from the Title in its rankings and Serps . OMG. We got traffic galore from Yahoo for the site during those years.

Unfortunately it converted at a very low rate as the traffic was world wide, and the business/site is entirely local.

During a period when Google first started showing a universal search map for phrases w/out geo modifiers, the site simultaneously was ranked 2nd for a period and 3rd for a period in Google organic rankings for the #1 industry term. The top 3 rankings sat above the Universal Search Maps insert.

Traffic from Google was astronomic and conversions for that phrase were similarly extraordinary.

Virtually no local businesses or SMB sites have that kind of visibility. My experience suggests that the estimates that approximately 50% of searches w/ local intent are made w/out geo modifiers are more than likely accurate.

Frankly I’d put a lot of PPC money into campaigns for the industry phrases w/out geo modifiers….and run those campaigns on tight and logical geographic boundries. They work.

In that there are so many searches for local goods and services that don’t include geo modifiers, its a definite improvement in search engine quality to provide maps of the local sources of these goods and qualities for these searches.

If a searcher doesn’t like them….ignore the map and just scroll down the page and start reviewing organic serps results.

Traffic and coversions soared. It was astronomical.

I would suggest the patents as reading material to all. Bill does a great job filtering these but I always find tidbits in these even on 3rd, 4th or 5th rereads…