News Source: http://blog.cre8asite.net
Published: Apr 09, 2009 - 01:56 pm
Story Found By: vandelay 1040 Days ago
Category: Searching
As is noted, this has major implications for all local marketers. It is presumed that Google infers from your IP address where you are located. It then will give you a list of the 10 most relevant local suppliers of the service.
4 Comments
Comments
tks, vandelay, for sphinning this. I’m intrigued as to whether anyone else has seen this small local search box. It creates a two step local process for pizza at least where I’m located in Canada.
Updated since official Google announcement does not mention this small search window. Curious.
I had to login just to say how lousy this is behaving in the UK - local search *may* work in a huge geographic region like the USA, but in the UK an ISP can have servers in a specific location, yet have users based on a static IP there but based all over the UK - or else put users on dynamic IPs, which means their location will constantly change.Point being, local targeting just does not work in a small geographic region with high diversity signals the UK, and Google’s Local results are ridiculous.Users go to Google to find what they need - telling users to adjust result to make them work is tantamount to Google admitting their search feature is failing users. Only, Google don’t seem to appreciate that.
Google can, does, and will rely on ISP cooperation for this, since reliable knowledge of provisioned IPs is gold when it comes to geolocation. It also represents another monetization channel for ISPs... tell Google where the users are and collect pennies for your efforts.Naive Google "engineers" (little "e") years ago stressed that using a local ISP could be good for local SEO. By now they must be more enlightened than that. With ISPs they can have a business arrangeent, impose quality ratings, test performance of local information, all while testing user response. No reason not to expect more and more of this, unless some privacy advocate speaks up. By the way this is exactly what the founders of the Internet warned against... coopting the edge-centric design of the Internet for commercial gain by large, controlling players. The more cenralized the Internet management becomes (such as resticting your access to an IP number), the less innovation we can expect to see.