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mobilemaps.com the open source alternative.
Philip

There is something those outside the USA can do about this:
Mobilemaps is the open source alternative. You will need a little geo experience at this stage to make it work outside of USA/UK, and the map and geocoding data must be available in your country.

This solution was around well before google's - or even their programming competition which introduced this to them. We're looking for active help from developers, and it's a shame slashdot don't consider mentioning us. We'll be launching a collaborative geo-crawler shortly, so there should be plenty to do.

Philip Abrahamson
Mobilemaps Development Team

I've been working on an open source web crawler, which is part of Mobilemaps, an open source alternative to Google's new "Search by Location" demo.

The Mobilemaps spider acts like a traditional crawler except that it also locates US/UK street addresses on Web pages.

I'm sure the code can be improved on significantly, but it may be worthwhile looking over. It uses MySQL to store the data. It relies on processes rather than threads because of the old LWP perl library I used. It can be hooked up over multiple machines, but is perhaps too processor intensive in the code that conforms to the robots exclusion standard. We've indexed 10's of millions of pages with it so we've had to work around most of the obscure issues you run into doing spidering.

We would also like to move in the directions you plan, namely collaborative spidering - which makes a lot of sense for a location based search like ours because each search engine only needs their local Web pages indexed on a small machine.

Philip Abrahamson
Mobilemaps Development Team

I've posted below, but in case it's lost in the noise, here's another one - open source search, open source biz plan:

Mobilemaps.com

It's a location search rather than a traditional search, and the demo is of California. Some commentary from Search Engine Watch is here.

The biz plan is geotargeted advertising - articles on it published here , and here.

Here's one - open source search, open source biz plan:

Mobilemaps.com

It's a location search rather than a traditional search, and the demo is of California. Some commentary from Search Engine Watch is here.

The biz plan is geotargeted advertising - articles on it published here , and here.

I'm working on an open-source location search (Mobilemaps) which aims to create a collaborative market for developers/portals using it.

The right service in this case is geotargeted advertising for local businesses wanting to gain some visibility on the net. It's an extension of a proven business model used by search engines like Google.

The plan is there's no need for developers to be paid for their code, they just earn money by participating in the advertising service by operating the location search for their local area.

Actually there's another reason for a physical business - like a restaurant - to have a web site, which is to be found in the first place. Think of it as a yellow pages listing - I'm sure you have one of those!?

"Location based search" services on computers and cell-phones will increasingly be used instead of yellow pages to locate businesses.

For an open-source example look at:
mobilemaps.com

Instead of a flashy, expensive website, all it needs is a single page with a paragraph describing the type of restaurant and including an address, phone number, and opening hours.