The change was announced on the 12th of January via a press release. t-info is the not so successful consumer online part of the big mother ship DETAG (Deutsche Telekom AG). This name change somewhat seems to be rather quickly decided as I can’t seem to find a logo on either their website nor the press release.

What once started off to conquer the web in Germany is now shrunk to this newly named company – owned by a selection of German yellow & white pages publishers and the Deutschen Telekom Medien GmbH, DeTeMedien.

The most commonly known service run by the former t-info GmbH is suchen.de. Suchen.de is a local search service owned by the same people that own the biggest parts of GelbeSeiten and DasOertliche the biggest and most commonly accepted as the most successful players in the old, offline yellow pages and white pages business.

Suchen.de was and is some sort of a playground where the rather slowly moving “yellow pages publishers” could try and get used to performance based online marketing. The established YP publishers have always been hesitant to hurt their mighty brands and the flat fee based incomes by opening the business model to the idea of performance based ones. Suchen.de has therefore built its very own local PPC product through which small business owners can book text based ads much like the ones on Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo! YSM.

The service is used as a ‘white label product’ by a couple of other sites like mopo.de, reiseplanung.de and Microsoft live search

Now SEARCHTEQ is trying to position itself as a more broadly aiming service provider that offers consulting services and solutions in areas like SEO and data security as their MD Andreas Arndt points out in the press release.

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

t-info is now SEARCHTEQ – wants to be seen as a search competence center

I’ve learned in quite some years working in and for the Internet industry that it is always a good idea to check whatever you are going to do against the real life scenario that closest matches your online venture.

For instance if you want to build an online shop and make it successful then go out there visit the brick and mortar shops and have a good look around.

Dig deep till you know what makes them successful and try to port that to the online world.

The things that you might recognize are good customer service, good location, skilled sales people and so on and so forth.  

Now looking at what social local websites are trying to mimic or replace is the way we go about decision making for questions like.

-    Where do I take my girlfriend for dinner
-    Which plumber do I call to fix my dripping pipes 

The social local websites – learn from others

Social local websites like Yelp or Qype do have a lot of followers and users. These sites allow you to write reviews and comment on businesses and places so that you can share your experiences with others.

Here you can learn from other peoples experiences about a new and great restaurant or an awesome plumber. And it may also help you to avoid making the same mistake that another person who hired an electrician that was just pricey and incompetent had made before.

Now that’s a great improvement to the old school yellow pages scenario – one might think – where the one business with the biggest ad, who simply paid the most or the one with the catchiest name that happened to be on the top spot of the page would always make the race.

But does all that really help us to make decisions and even more important to make better decisions?

Lets try and compare that with the real life scenario and see what we can learn.

In real life how do we really go about choosing the right handyman or the best restaurant for a posh night out?We will ask our friends and more generally people we know and trust to give us advice and suggest a solution to our “problem”

Now you can say that this is what Qype and Yelp are doing as well. But that’s only half the truth.

Everything else aside I see two big problems with this approach.

One is the problem with too much choice and information overflow.

I’ve been to San Francisco and a friend had booked a table in a restaurant. Being curios of what the place might be like I checked it out on the web and came across the yelp reviews of the place.

There are more than 460 reviews to that place on Yelp.

Reading this amount of information in the real world would mean that your friend would talk for approx 2.5 hours about this place and I reckon you would be confused and dizzy afterwards.

If I had had to choose the restaurant the dilemma would have even been bigger.

A search for a French restaurant near the union square in San Francisco returns 80 places to choose from with an average of more than 100 reviews each. So I could be ending up spending days to figure out which one might be the best for me.

How is that supposed to help me make a decision?
This is adding to my dilemma and not solving the question of where should I go.

That’s when I give up and go and ask the concierge of the hotel I’m staying for advice.

(Note: Barry Schwartz has done a great talk about the on how too much choice is a bad thing. Really worth the time to watch)

Imagine you go to a big drugstore and you want to buy toothpaste – they will have dozens of different ones to choose from. The Yelp approach to solve the problem of finding the right one is to read the information printed on the package and learn as much as possible to make the right choice – or better an educated guess.

You would still be left unsure if your decision is going to be the right one.

So in reality what has happened is that you loose time.

What we are all looking for – and that might be an illusion – is one answer to our question and only one.

And the same goes for all these social local websites. They might help you to make better choices but at a significant cost. Your time! – and quite a lot of it.

Just search to solve the problem!

So another way to try and solve my problem with the restaurant in San Francisco is to go and try a search for the answer.
And guess what Google Maps does provide me with more than 2.500 answers to my question not to mention the 220.000 that the web search does delight me with.

The experience with Yahoo! is similar – web search informs me about 1.2 million results and our local search has more than 190 answers to my question.

Even worse is that here the way to narrow down the results for both Google and Yahoo! is far less adequate and will hardly help me with getting to a more “digestible” amount of information.

So that failed for me as well. Why?

Well for local search there are a number of problems that lead to a rather poor user experience – well lets say felt user experience.

1.    The data basis to base the algorithm on for local search is poor in comparison to e.g. web search

• The core data set.
  In a core business data set you will only have a business name a category and after geocoding long and lat to the business location.
   
• The enhanced data set.
  For richer data sets you will have additional data like opening hours, price range and availability of parking areas.

• User generated content
  UGC ratings and reviews of the business.

The only comprehensive set of data being the core listings there is very little information to base the answer on.

Compare that with all the factors that are taken into account for ranking websites and you see where I’m coming from.

2.    The lack of data is more visible than in web search

In web search the user assumption is “if it is not in there it doesn’t exist”. Which is fair enough cause that’s what we teach them.

In local search a user will often realize that Bobs Pizza place is not listed – even so it definitely exists.

So users will get that bad feeling of not getting all the information – and without the full story how are they to be convinced to find the right answer?

So how would the ideal website answer my question?

Well the same way a friend would do.

In a short conversation we would define the criteria the business would need to match and then I would get a maximum of 3 suggestions to choose from which would be ranked in a subjective manner.

DONE and I’m happy and good to go.

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Why today local search fails – and how to fix it

Now yesterday Qype seem to have started what could be called phase two – in terms of reaching out to possible partners and businesses for that program.

After phase one where they approached businesses personally and tried to win them for the program.

They have sent out subscription PDFs to businesses listed and claimed on Qype by the owner.

The mail tells the businesses how to sign up and points to the fact that the most attractive offerings will be promoted in the Qype newsletter and on the www.qype.com/coupons page. The business could therefore get much higher visibility for his offers in the Qype community reaching 1.2 Mio User per month.

Would be interesting to know what the turnover of this campaign will be. But IMHO the coupon approach is at least way more tangible for a SME than the “gamble” of PPC.

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Qype.com coupons – reaching out for the SME

Ice Bear having a dive curtesy of ucumari

The stats of the last couple of weeks did provide us with quite some surprises – really. After weeks cinema related queries in the UK got outranked by real-estate related ones, and bodyculture in Germany got way less attention than animal shelters.

I can’t share any actuals but the story in Germany tells a tale of people probably having problems with their pets in the travel season. The French do love Yoga, Paris and camping and somehow have quite some interest in their social security system. The Brits are way harder to read the – everlasting love for cinemas and real estate – have to tell you the TV is full of shows on real estate here in the UK – is only to be interrupted by a sudden interest in Zoos.

“Mafia” noodles curtesy of Wm Jas

Well and not to withhold the highlight of the day a German restaurant that got loads of attention. “da bruno in duisburg” an Italian restaurant that didn’t get a four star rating in the Michelin Restaurant guide or a new world-class chef but was the scene for a horrible killing of six Italians which is believed to be related to the Calabrian Ndrangheta – which means “Honoured Society” – or simply put the Mafia.

You see that checking your logs and stats is always telling you a story. To be continued…

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Holiday Season in Local Search – Movers and Shakers

Suchen.de seems to provide the Index of businesses that you get when performing a search.

The maps used are Microsoft Virtual Earth and definitely the highlight of the product – especially the bird’s eye view which is known from their maps product.

It is clearly in a Beta mode and does cover all the basic functionalities and requirements of a local search application.

Whats interesting about it is that one of the Big Players has chosen to work on the basis of a thirdparty solution and not on its own technology. As US msn has local.live.com which is a “home made” search.
 

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

MSN Launched Local Search in Germany – in Cooperation with Suchen.de

German social local review site Qype has launched a new service Coupons

They have launched this new and interesting feature yesterday. In their latest news-letter they say that during the last couple of month they have approached businesses in major German cities to see if they would be willing to offer Qype users a special price for their service – like half price for a try out dinner at a local restaurant etc.

To earn the coupons the users can either pay with money – through an online payment option – or use membership points that you can earn by submitting reviews to the site.

Quite a nice idea – which has proven to be successful offline in Germany already – ported to the online world – there are publishers who sell regional guides filled with coupons which are said to be reasonably successful.
Plus it seems like a good way to generate reviews and increase user engagement.

Whilst having lauched their site in the UK recently the service seems to be Germany only – for now.

update:

Nicole @ detech.blognation has some more detail read Qype Launches Coupons, Available For Points Or Money

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Qype started new monetization / user engagement system with coupons

The retention rate is one core value you want to have an eye on – and a user that you helped out at some point where he was “lost” and typed in something like “plumber” or “pizza” by guiding him to the content he is really looking for is very likely to come back – and we love users who come back.

Now AOL has quite a handy integration in their/Google’s web search for searches like this.

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Local Intent without an Identifier – AOL will get you!

The Google Lat Long Blog has a post announcing the introduction of neighborhood search capability being added to their Maps product. Good for them! As people tend to search for Neighborhoods as their “where” terms to get local content. What does work in Maps  bagels upper east side  new york however seems not to be used in the Google onebox results in web-search yet – wonder when this will be added as well.

To add to the list of Trulia, Ask.com and Google I want to mention Yahoo! Local UK and DE  – which were launched with neighborhood capabilities last year.

And to add to the list of providers on top of Urban Mapping and HomeGain – there is WhereOnEarth who were acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 and are the guys that provide this capability to us and other Yahoo! properties.

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Google Maps adds Neighborhoods – We Have Them Since More Than a Year Now

Submit your business to Local Search Engines

Many Thanks for the support and keep sending e-mails to  submission@locallytype.com or just write a comment to this post.

Tags: local search, yp, yellow pages, yahoo, google, ask city

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

Guide On How To Get Your Business Listed on 48 Major Local Search Engines

As we are getting more and more e-mails of people asking us how to get their business listed or information changed on our Yahoo! Local Search pages in Germany and the United Kingdom.
I figured it is about time explain this on a page and gather some of my bookmarks to the pages where you can add your business to get listed on Google Maps, Ask City, Live Local etc. in the US and Europe and some other players.

While updating and looking for these links I got the impression that sites are almost “hiding” these information … guess not on purpose.

I’ll add more countries and sites in the coming weeks & please send me any missing bit to submission (at) locallytype.com and I’ll add them happily.

List of submission pages

this is a blog post as originally posted on locallytype

How do I get my Business Listed or updated on Local Search Sites?