bakedjake - 4:58 pm on Nov 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

I think most of the industry players are approaching it from a vertical perspective. A golf course has different useful attributes from a restaurant.

If you approach the problem from the perspective of one vertical at a time, it makes it much more manageable. I can get relevant metadata about golf courses from a few sources and have a pretty comprehensive search built.

But you have about 400 meaningful local consumer categories. So it's a slow process.

More and more I think we'll find specialized vertical sites being eaten up by the local players.

how realistic is it to get a huge number of these small shops on board?

To what you said eariler, it's very realistic if you're the Yellow Pages. With the feet on the street that they have, it's not hard to collect a few extra attributes from each business when they buy their ad every year.

But, there's hundreds of yellow pages directories in the US alone. So the challenege is to aggregate all of that data. Even Dex, in the western US, needs data from someone else for the eastern US. So the yellow pages find themselves in the same boat as everyone else.