Unspoken qualifiers

by | Apr 13, 2007 | Local search, Social search |

Here are some “typical” local searches — queries that people might type into an online Yellow Pages product or its equivalent:

  1. [ Pizza ] near [ Leesburg, VA ]
  2. [ Appliance repair ] near [ Grand Rapids, MI ]
  3. [ Lawnmower sales ] near [ Portland, OR ]

These queries are “search-engine speak”; people have been trained to formulate their desires in a particular shorthand, to maximize the chances of finding what they seek.

But do these formulations truly reflect what we’re looking for?

Nope: Unless someone is seeking information on a specific business, their query usually has an unspoken qualifier. For instance, I don’t just want pizza in Leesburg, VA — I want the best pizza in Leesburg, VA.

(“Best” is a frequent unspoken qualifier, but by no means the only one. Other likely suspects include cheap, trustworthy, prompt, authorized, etc. In an ideal world, I would add “used by my friends,” “owned by a neighbor,” and more.)

In order to become an important resource in people’s lives, a local search product must tackle these unspoken qualifiers — must make them central to its mission, in fact.

Without focusing on the unspoken qualifiers, which are mainly social-type information, the best a local search product can hope to be is “a better Yellow Pages.” And that’s not much of a rallying cry, IMO: Maps, attributes, blah, blah, blah.

This isn’t an original insight, I know. It was behind the recent burst of “Local 2.0” rate-and-review products — sites such as Insider Pages, Yelp and Judy’s Book — and, before them, the more scalable aspects of what I’d call Local 1.0: Places like CitySearch and my alma mater, AOL’s Digital City.

Still, the insight has yet to be fully acted on:

  1. Rate-and-review looks (to me, anyways) to be reaching the limits of its usefulness. It’s not the solution — or at least, not the whole solution. I’ll post more about rate-and-review soon.
  2. The search portals seem very ambivalent about pushing the social aspects of local search. They are heavily constrained by their devotion to a map-based interface, which won’t allow them put social information front-and-center.

Loladex intends to fill the gap.