{"id":578,"date":"2008-03-31T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2008-03-31T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/31\/does-local-need-to-be-held-to-a-higher-standard-ahmed-farooq-responds\/"},"modified":"2008-03-31T10:36:08","modified_gmt":"2008-03-31T14:36:08","slug":"does-local-need-to-be-held-to-a-higher-standard-ahmed-farooq-responds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/31\/does-local-need-to-be-held-to-a-higher-standard-ahmed-farooq-responds\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Local need to be held to a higher standard? Ahmed Farooq Responds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given the recent reports (A New Scourge For Yahoo: Affiliate Mapspam<\/a>) of mapspam at Yahoo that I perceived as possibly criminal, several folks responded that I had overreacted or mischaracterized the event. I started thinking about the legal, social and technical context for Local in our lives and whether if we didn’t hold it to much, much higher standards on all fronts (business, technical, social, legal) it would succeed.<\/p>\n

I decided that I would like the opinions of others that I respect. They come from a range of technical and social backgrounds but all have something to contribute to Local Search conversation. The first responses to my question by Danny Sullivan and Chris Silver Smith can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ahmed Farooq<\/a> of iBegin<\/a> has a unique perspective on the issues confronting Local as he has created a user facing local site for Toronto and currently provides basic business listing data to a number of clients through iBegin.<\/p>\n

Here is the question:<\/p>\n

As we move forward to what I call the age of the iPhroid<\/a> with who knows what transactional and social capabilities, does Local need to be held to a higher standard to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153truly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d succeed and play a trusted role in our lives?<\/p>\n

What is your opinion?
\nAhmed<\/strong>: I’ve argued for a while that what gave the YP books context were the ads.
\nThe ads gave you information on each business – are they open 24 hours? Are
\nthey civil or criminal lawyers? Do they have seafood? And so forth and so
\nforth.<\/p>\n

Having played both the consumer-side and the business-supplying side, the
\nreason we decided to stick with ‘core’ data is because I don’t see any way
\nto normalize enhanced data across the entire US. When customers of base data
\n(competitors and us included – I don’t claim we are perfect) are always
\ncomplaining that core data is not right, how does one even begin to think
\nabout tackling enhanced?<\/p>\n

The two [current] approaches both fail:<\/p>\n

1. Silo. Buy data from one or two sources, invite communities to
\nparticipate, and sit back and watch the profits roll. Problem is that while
\nthe community may be willing to update information, they are almost always
\nrestricted to (1) Base data and (2) ‘Sexy’ businesses (restaurants, clubs,
\netc). Updating information on a printing company? Doesn’t happen. It may
\nwork on a micro-level, but it does not work on a macro level.<\/p>\n

2. Aggregated. Obtain information from various sources like Google does.
\nWhile this means more up to date information, it also means a mess of bad
\ndata mingled in there. All sites have good and bad data – mix them all up
\nand you end up with a lot of good and bad data!<\/p>\n

I have no solutions. I may very well be hurting my business here (always
\nmore profitable to sell the full US than a state), but I do not see any
\nfull-US local search engines attaining proper relevancy and context.
\nSpecialized local search engines per city or even perhaps per state – yes.<\/p>\n

So to get to the core question – local needs to be held to a higher
\nstandard, because going to a dead website is nowhere near the same horrible
\nexperience as going to a business that has moved (phone # same, address
\nchanged) or dead. But will there be ever one or two sites that do local well
\nacross the US? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n

One last point – I believe the ones best positioned to do something
\ncountry-wide are the dominant YP publishers – eg YPG in Canada, and so
\nforth. Their conundrum of course is that the ‘precise’ context we need only
\ncomes via ads. If the advertiser doesn’t pay, they won’t utilize the extra
\nrelevancy, and the end-user loses out. If they allow that extra context for
\nfree, they lose out greatly in revenue.<\/p>\n

Seems like I’m rambling a bit now, hopefully got some new gears moving in
\nyour collective brains \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given the recent reports (A New Scourge For Yahoo: Affiliate Mapspam) of mapspam at Yahoo that I perceived as possibly criminal, several folks responded that I had overreacted or mischaracterized the event. I started thinking about the legal, social and technical context for Local in our lives and whether if we didn’t hold it to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-mobil","category-uncategorized","category-yahoo-local"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}