1-In real life i choose my friends based on common experiences that i have shared with them over a certain period of time.
I trust them because i know them. So if i want to have a nice dinner in a new restaurant in Paris, i would rather ask my friends for an advice instead of screaming out loud in the street for it. It’d be less ridiculous and more efficient!
But among my friends, i would not ask all of them, i would choose the one(s) that i know share common cooking tastes with me.

In the end i might get 3 advices ranked in a subjective manner BUT those come from a long way. They are the results of the ability i had to choose my friends and grow our friendship.
Being able to reflect this real-life friendship scenario in the internet world would be a good way to filter out results and enhance any new local products.

2-In real life scenario, when searching for a nice place to hang out, it is not a matter of finding all the local restaurants BUT discovering the restaurants known by people i do trust which as i told can be friends, cooking specialist, neighbours, experts, cityguides…or people having my profile (family with a little kid), the tripadvisor feature enabling to filter out results based on your profile though being simple is quite efficient.

@David: Thanks for your comprehensive comment and for sharing your point of view. I’m totally with you regarding the fact that is a dream to think local search data could ever become comprehensive. Know my taste and have my trust is part of what Mr Sullivan would call part of search 4.0. This is clearly the way to go and based on gathering information like this and using them to refine the results is whilst still a dream one way to tackle the “problem”.

@Bill: I think you nail todays dilemma. It is very difficult to gather really comprehensive reliable data to start with. Then you want reviews and rightly you point out that you want recent reviews. As a 2 year old review is just not as reliable as one gathered 2 weeks ago. And yes ultimately going for a website to get information one time and talking with the concierge in another occasion is undoubtedly the best strategy today – regardless which site you would use to get a proper advice.

Overall the question is how is that going to change – if at all. And what would we need to do to really really change the game. As launching one review site after another seems to only provide a slight alternation to the sites we have available already.
I’m looking for the next big thing the change in the game…

Should local search be a recommendation system, or a complete directory listing of businesses, or both?

Should I be able to sort local businesses by:

1) Location and distance
2) Completeness of information about the business (such as parking availability, hours and days of operation, accessibility for people with handicaps, range of prices, contact information, etc.)
3) Broad recommendations that I can browse
4) (Trusted) recommendations by reputable reviewers as voted by other reviewers
5) Recommendations by reviewers who share common interests with me in specific categories, based upon factors that might be implicit or explicit or both
6) Recency of recommendations (I see too many old reviews that no longer apply to businesses)
7) Criteria about different aspects of a business that I can select, and give different weights to

Would local social networks benefit by allowing users to rate businesses by a number of criteria, including customer service, quality of goods, cost and value, and other criteria that might be appropriate for a specific category? And let other people rate those reviews?

I’d definitely like to be able to bounce back and forth between directory/search system and recommendation system, and be given a number of selectable options that involve specific criteria of my choosing, reputation of reviewers, similarity of interests, and some level of trust.

Acquiring enough data for a local search/social local network to work well is one of those things that I’m watching from the sidelines, to see how well it can be done. Sometimes asking the concierge and maybe a couple of other people is the best option.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web…….

However, I don’t think it is possible to generate this “utopia”, without having the search engine become more equipped to know your habits and preferences. With search, people have become acclimated to getting a consistent level of qaulity – relevant websites, with relevant content – that isn’t personalized.

Local search has to go beyond that, and learn personal preferences. Otherwise, we are hitting a scenario where you are getting the 3 places that the search engine chooses for everyone – without understanding the criteria(the highest ranked restaurant for customer service, when I really just want a quick affordable lunch).

Currently, if search engines would only pick the 3 most relevant restaurats, it would be like a lead gen company, that gives you three – of their choice of service providers, that match their standards.

Even if the company builds their brand around having quality service providers in their database, and provide service guarantees, would you prefer that over say, yelp or google maps -with their thousands of results? I may be in the minority, but I like to have as many options as possible. Those companies still rake it in (think servicemagic), but I don’t think that it’s the model of the future.

I agree that local search has to go beyond just the listings, enhanced data and UGC; and break it down into more specific measurements. E.G. for restaurants, they would have to rate it based on quality of food, style of food, speed of service, budget etc.

They would also have to extrapolate that data from current UGC – or train UGC reviewers to rate all of those specifics. Having a detailed database is critical.

But more than that, I think in your utopia, we would need personalized search… any company that wants to be like my buddy giving me referrals on food places better:

a) know my taste
b) have my trust
c) able to give me the answer in an easy format.

Translated to computer talk, they need to have built a database of my preferences in the specific area, and be able to give me the answer without asking me too many annoying questions. (I think that having to refine your search with check boxes etc. is lousy…it doesn’t reflect how you talk to your friend. You really do need comprehensive data on me.)

That means that the local search provider would have to have earned my trust for their search results as well… it also means that I would probably come back to it a heck of alot (meaning a bunch of recurring revenue for that company). So the first provider that comes up with an effective search methodology – and has it catch on, will probably gain the largest market share.

Maybe think general social network (has tons of personal preferences there – not so hard to build. Contrast that to yelp, which just has reviews, and not much of people’s personal preferences overall.) + local search engine… and the utopia might not be just a dream in the near future.

A great opportunity would be for facebook to integrate their business listings and personal preferences… They seem very intent on integrating users preferences into search – like with their recent fiasco with beacon. (I think it was a gutsy move into personal and social search, and although it was a PR hell-scene, it’s a start.)

Yelp and the other social review sites just don’t have a means to organically generate my prefernces in random areas… the main thing one does there is review businesses… and often, you are looking for advice on something you haven’t done before… so you haven’t reviewed other places.