Google puts one more nail in the yellow pages coffin

March 31, 2004 by JD
Filed under: Advertising, Internet, Murphy North Carolina

About a year ago, I started recommending, to anyone who would listen, that it was important to put full addresses, city, state, zip code and phone numbers with area codes on their websites.

Sharon Fling has been predicting the importance of promoting small local businesses on the Internet for a couple of years now, and those who have followed her advice are very well placed as we see more of the major search engines incorporate local searching in their arsenal of search tools.

Google now offers local search results — something they’ve been working on for months — and their implementation is coming along nicely.

For example, I just entered “restaurant 28906″ on their search page, and at the top of the results it shows a heading link for “Local results for restaurant near 28906″ followed by three local restaurants with their address and phone number.

If you click on the link just mentioned, it brings up a page of restaurants near Murphy, NC sorted by distance. It even lists the mileage and direction to the restaurant with a link for directions.

At the top of the page are other categories related to restaurants.

Right below that is a compass icon with a link to see the listings on a map of the region.

Clicking the link brings you to another page with a Mapquest map showing numbers indicating the restaurants. There is a legend to the right of the map showing the restaurant indicated by each number, with a link to the restaurant.

Mapquest maps for our mountain area are not extremely accurate and I often get erroneous results, but this map looks mostly accurate — although not 100%.

If I click on my favorite restaurant in Murphy, Shoebooties Cafe, next to its number in the legend, it brings you to a page dedicated to Shoebooties, with its location noted on the map and a button for getting driving directions.

I’m less satisfied with MapQuest’s driving directions, since they give you a 23 minute, 12 mile drive to get to a location that is about a 30 second walk from the main intersection in downtown Murphy. The last two or three steps in the directions are accurate, but I have no idea why they start where they do, way out west of Murphy a long way from the town.

Regardless of the deficiencies of the MapQuest directions, the Google implementation of local search is accurate and fast.

Let’s try another. How about “antiques 28906″ or “real estate 28906″?

For antiques, it lists three shops in the local section at the top of the page, but misses Pickled Parrot Antiques which is right in downtown Murphy and starts with a shop over two miles away. Pickled Parrot Antiques is listed first in the regular search results, right below the local results — so there are still some bugs to be worked out for the most accurate results.

For real estate, the link to the full page is more accurate than for antiques. It correctly lists the downtown real estate agencies and extends outwards from there. This is clearly useful.

While the Google local results feature is not as accurate as being listed in the yellow pages, it is free and fast. As time goes by, I’m assuming it can only get more accurate as Google improves their algorithm and cross-linking.

I think you’ll find this to be a very useful tool.

Looking for a bagpiper near you?

On a lark, I tried searching for “bagpiper 28906″ and learned that Clay Will lives about 40 miles southeast of me on the north shore of Lake Rabun in Georgia. I bet I never would have found him in the local yellow pages!

But, just when this looks great, I tried searching for “musician 28906″ and got results that were not very good. I know there are hundreds of excellent musicians within a 20 mile radius of here and none of them are listed.

“pizza murphy nc” correctly lists Downtown Pizza Co (where I had lunch a couple of days ago and enjoyed it) and branches out from there. It misses Papa’s Pizza To Go in Murphy, but finds the franchise in Blairsville, Georgia, which it says is about 15 miles south of Murphy, but I’m pretty sure it’s a good bit farther than that.

While still a work in progress, Google’s local search is decidedly useful, especially for businesses that are most likely to have a website or which may be listed in various directories.

I could probably spend the rest of the day playing with this, but it’s time to move on to other tasks!

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