Local Search’s Importance Highlighted by Google’s Search Guru

“Local search” - the term internet marketers and search engine insiders use for when you and I punch in search queries like “Italian restaurant Toronto” or “Boston aluminum siding” - is, with mobile search from cell phones and handhelds, the growing focus in online marketing and internet advertising.

Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering -Search Quality, is the man encharged with honing the algorithm formula behind Google’s ever expanding capacity to bring information to the screens of desktops, laptops and - increasingly - mobile phones and handheld devices like the SmartPhone and BlackBerry. In a recent interview with C/NetNews.com’s Stephen Shankland, the Google VP pointed to the growing prominence and importance of “local search”, both to consumers and to Google. Noting, first and foremost that Google’s aim is to provide “universal search” (that is, to provide whatever information, from whatever source on the planet it is that people are searching for), the formerly sequestered chief arbiter of Google’s search algorithm, highlighted the growing importance of “local search” to consumers and, therfore, to Google, hands down the world’s largest and most frequently used search engine.

“We want to get everything into Google search,” Google’s search guru conceded in one of his rare public interviews. “Having said that, there are specific searches–the kind of operations you want to do in the results. For example when you do local search, geography matters, where it is on the map matters, and you want to see the results on a map. Or when you do product search, price matters. If you have cases of searches where some things matter more and you want to allow people to operate on those or navigate those parameters, then we’ll give you more tools to do that.”

Google is once again leading the pack, proactively responding to how users do search. Recent numbers from pollster Nielson/NetSurvey show that 86% of internet users will make use of local search terms, and 90% of the transactions that are initiated via local search are completed off-line - i.e., at a local business.

As local search and, increasingly, mobile search come of age, the growing usage of local search as a portal into the products and services consumers are looking for in their neighbourhood highlight the importance for small businesses and large chains alike to have an optimized local business profile web page or web site domain that search engines can find and which will funnel increasing web traffic their way. Local search is already the means by which online marketers are converting web traffic into foot traffic - and given the comments of Google’s search guru, it looks like local search is here to stay as the emerging way we find products and services in this evermore digital world.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Local Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.