Comments on: Finding a Yogurt Shop A Mile Away: I'm Not Feeling Lucky.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:01:19 +0000

I think it's hilarious that the 3rd organic result on Bing for "edgartown yogurt" is now this blog posting...

http://www.bing.com/search?q=edgartown%20yogurt&form=QBLH

By: Ray

Ray — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:37:59 +0000

Always been useless for what you are trying to do. We travel worldwide for 3 to 4 months each summer. Useless all over the world.

By: Morgan

Morgan — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:36:31 +0000

If it's Tisberry, you just needed to add an MA

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en&q=yogurt%20edgartown&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl

By: Vici

Vici — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:44:47 +0000

That’s crazy… now we are looking for frozen yogurts on the web … where are those times when we tried all frozen food and we were sick from those

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:48:25 +0000

foursquare does have search, and that search is very local, and once you find the place on foursquare it may have tips on what is good or bad at that place; foursquare is a natural choice for this as it is community maintained and there is some value to the person that first creates a location. Unfotunately, either the foursquare users where you are do not care about this place enough to create it yet OR the density of foursquare users it too low where you are. This is one of the many dangers of relying on the social web.

By: Corey Smith

Corey Smith — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:00:04 +0000

With Google web search becoming saturated with results nobody wants, could the yellow pages and 411 phone calls make a comeback?

By: hubrudy

hubrudy — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 02:44:43 +0000

Trying to find a place through Google has been really hit or miss for me. If you know enough about the place, but just can’t remember the address, then you can usually get what you need, but like you pointed out, when you just have a vague idea of what you’re looking for and a category, there’s a lot of ‘fluff’ in the results, and high ranking results that are just filled with spam and crappy re-links. Not sure how those sites managed to crack the Google code, but they must be making a pretty good amount of coin doing it, because there are a ton of copy-cat sites out there that are pretty much all just different looking versions of the same crappy thing. Let’s just hope there’s an algorithm update in the near future that addresses this problem.

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:42:31 +0000

Did you try bing?

http://www.bing.com/search?q=edgartown%20yogurt&form=QBLH

By: Basil Enan

Basil Enan — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:09:37 +0000

IMO Google isn't very good for local search b/c local shops / service providers aren't very good at Google. By that I mean, local shops / service providers aren't very good at SEO or at establishing a web presence in general and Google's bots won't find you unless you make your self known and relevant to them.

But some people are very good at SEO and create worthless pages (like "American Towns" in the above example) and get google to send them traffic.

That's a bad experience for the searcher and reflects badly on Google. I agree that Foursquare and Facebook could have better results based on people checking-in but their advantage would last only until they found some success convincing people to use them to search. Once that happened, the same people who created "American Towns" would find a way to game them too.

What's the answer? Some sort of curation would be a huge help. AOL (via Patch) is getting into hyper-local in this way. If FB and FS factored the # of check-ins to relevance they could accomplish this too (i.e. fake results wouldn't have many check-ins.

Similar issues exist for car insurance results and my company CoverHound (www.coverhound.com) is tackling that.

By: Caribbean Carl

Caribbean Carl — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:14:12 +0000

Very interesting example on multiple levels.

The failure to list the actual shop isn't necessarily disturbing -- after all, the shop is relatively new, and even Google is going to miss the mark occasionally. Even if the shop has its own website or Facebook page, no one would be linking to it yet, so their standard approach is going to fail.

But, this example shows two much more significant problems.

First, why are they listing a directory page that's filled with ads, and offers little or no "real" content so high in the results? This can't be considered a "quality" information resource by any stretch of the imagination.

Second, why are they mapping so many supposedly "local" search results that aren't in Edgarton, including a DunkinDonuts -- a chain that isn't exactly famous for yogurt.