What are people looking for in Local Search?

The first local SES was on and loads of numbers are flying around the net now. Some of the most interesting ones are from comScore.
Danny Sullivan & Barry Schwartz touched upon them in the 09/28/2006 episode of the daily search-cast of webmasterradio.fm.

Based on a recent comScore Search Satisfaction study, 41 percent of those conducting a local search were searching for something in their home area, as opposed to searching for information on businesses in locales that they intended to visit. Additionally, among those searching in their home area, 59 percent indicated they were searching for a restaurant or something entertainment-related, such as a theater, theme park or an attraction for sightseeing. Another 52 percent said they were searching specifically for a business phone number or address. Two out of five local searchers (41 percent) were looking for information on a local service in their home area, including car rental office, dry cleaner or lawyer.

High bandwith and flaterates seem to drive traffic from gold old Yellow-Pages-Books to the websites of Yahoo!, Google, MSN and AOL. The topics searched for seem to be relatively steady. We in the EU however do see increases in public transport related queries as well as people looking for airoprt info …

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