bakedjake - 4:35 pm on Mar 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

Maybe the local-by-local sites, the well crafted ones, will simply say "We don't need your data, We have our own."

A very good point.

Metromix will continue to be, for the forseeable future, the king of Chicago entertainment and restaurant listings. Citysearch, G Local, Yahoo Local, TrueLocal, Interchange, or anything else probably won't displace them for folks trying to find things to do locally.

The challenge is how to work with those expert local sites that know the culture instead of trying to Wal-Mart them out of existance.

One point for Google's aggregation approach.

So, we can't say if "remote to local" search is dominated by a search within a baker's dozen of verticals, such as search for "local" hotels, transportation, restaurants, professionals, etc.

Remote to local is dominated by a small number of verticals. Hell, local to local may even be, when talking about "my" version of local search (physical storefronts or business contact information).

Dentists
Golf Courses
Real Estate
Restaurants

... are my top 4.

The cool thing about local at the moment is that there are enough hyenas to take down the lion, as Tom Clancy would say.