Slashdot Mirror
Who Are My Neighbors, Mr.Search Engine?
Phoe6 writes "'Google's goal is to connect searchers with the information they need whether it's halfway around the world or in their neighborhood,' said company co-founder Sergey Brin, as Google is unveiling its location-based search tool local.google.com.
This is going heads on with Yahoo, as it put its SmartView content on its maps." Phoe6 also points to this AP story carried by the Houston Chronicle about "Verizon Communications' SuperPages.com, overhauled to deliver more useful local results." Google's service seems to work pretty well -- I've just located a few coffee shops with free wireless within easy walking distance. Update: 03/17 18:33 GMT by T : Here's a no-reg link to the same AP story.
I suppose someone with a small business could check out what sort of nearby competition they have using this.
Also, when researching for possible locations for a business, maybe someone could type in their zip code to see whether or not the neighborhood already has people providing the planned service/goods?
Searching the three line greenbar yellow page listings is ok, but Google's keyword coverage seems a bit spotty. "94303 chinese food" doesn't turn up local results, but "94303 chinese" does.
The free text geo-categorization seems to depend on finding full addresses in the web pages, not as sophisticated as Metacarta or Topix.net
I say it's about time! Superpages.com and their likes have so far been nothing short of big disappointments. On superpages the results returned from simple searches are completely disappointing.
Yellow page companies are basically putting their stuff online, thinking, as long as it's got similar features as their offline book versions, it's good enough. Well it's not. And it's about damn time a competitor like Google shows up to ruin their show.
eTrade SUCKS
I wonder if this is part of a trend away from the common associations of the web being a giant globalized impersonal place full of strangers, and making it also have a more small and personal aspect- a good place to get information on (and maybe even interact or get involved with) your own neighborhood?
I wonder what's next? Ebay neighborhood garage sales? Bid online, walk next door to pick it up? Web-conferencing the community association meeting? Using an online dating service to meet people instead of going out to a ba... wait a minute.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Well, I tried 3 searches on both of the sites (verizon's and google's). On Google I was returned many matches in order of proximity. On verizon I just got a message telling me that no matches could be found for this location. The search included: Taco Bell Schnucks (a local supermarket chain) Bar
too big a search default range. I did a simple search on "italian" as the keyword with an urban address and got hits more than 50 miles away by default. Much simpler, IMO, to do 1, 5, or 10 miles at first, then perhaps automatically ranging outward if there are a very small number of hits.
In my search original result set (with the 50 miles range), I had the first few hits being a short distance away, then a chunk (ie, results 3-6) a great distance away, then another chunk (ie, results 7-10) back closer to home, with a lengthy divide between each set (ie, 1-3 and 7-10 were under 3 miles, while 3-6 were greater than 20 miles away. no italian in between seems quite odd for such an urban region). IMO, everything needs to be better sorted by distance from the input address.
And lastly, number the entries when the map is displayed: When I initially searched, I did not get a map showing what hit was where. After clicking a link to obtain that map containing little numbers showing where each hit was located, and a short list to the right of the map showed which marker matched which result. It would be useful if this numeric list were also done down below where the results have more detail (like phone and address).
Even despite the above, this is a pretty neat tool and could be rather useful for it's current state.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Some might remember this from a while back. This feature's origins come from the Google Programming Contest. They said that the good entries might actually become google features if they had sufficient merit. The winner from 2002 whipped up a prototype geographic search. I guess that this is the full-scale realization of that work.
Please stop misusing Catch-22 to describe chicken-egg problems or other paradoxes that are not Catch-22.
Of course I'm sure people who live in said places would also find the service useful. I hope Google expands its support soon.
Meta tags for longitude and latitude.
As the Google logo on the page states, this appears to be a public BETA.
I don't say this so that people don't critique the site yet.
Rather, after you discuss here, send your critique to Google! I'm excited about this, but the sort order of the results shows me things in New Jersey before it shows me things in Pennsylvania (and I know there are three Chinese Restaurants right around the corner, closer than Jersey). I would hope that either they already know about some of these issues or would like to make the search engine more useful.
The best place I could come up with was Google's Contact page, which has links to forums and the like, but no reference to local.google at all. If someone has a better place, please post it here. The local.google site has no contact link I can see.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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
mobilemaps.com the open source alternative.
Philip
Curious to figure out how it might work, I looked up my domain name. It gave me an address in Redwood City, CA. WTF?
(I once hosted with an ISP who had a POP there, but not at that location. My domain record has my correct address, as well as the correct contact addresses - which are in a different city in the same metro area.)
Digging around with google for that street address came up with Greatcircle - the maintainers of the majordomo mailing list. Nice guys, but I've never been associated with them. (Ought to install it some day. Back when I hosted mailing lists I administered them manually.)
Turns out that they've been using my domain name in their documentation as a generic domain name. And the doc is all over the web - including several mailing list archives in which Brent Chapman's signature appears, giving the company address. B-) Of course the doc is also on their website, as is there address.
Given the broad use and extensive documentation of majordomo, and the relatively low profile of my own little consulting firm, I suspect that my domain name appears on the net more often associated with the former than the latter.
I suspect the service is using webcrawler information to create a database of search terms vs things-that-look-like-addresses (either on the same page or the same site) then scoring matchups by frequency, and the search engine returns the highest score.
(Meanwhile I've found out where the spambots are harvesting one of the bogus usernames that keep showing up in spam to my site. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My web pages don't have any zip code or latitude / longitude information on them... and sure enough they don't show up in any local.google.com search.
What exactly does it look for on a page to know where the business is?
Should I put my entire address on every page? on just the home page? Or is a zip code in a meta tag good enough for google to know where I'm talking about.
I really like it! Searching for pizza in my zip code shows just what I would hope.
Celebrate Excellence!
Useless.... it's only for the United States.