nyehouse - 6:25 pm on Mar 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

This is a start. However the big weakness is that Google has no way of distinguishing local urls (URLS that represent a location on the ground) from URL that reference local information. So while 'hotels cityname' provides better results that regular google, it still provide links to directories as opposed to the hotel's website.

The query 'hotels pasadena' returns all incorrect URL matches. Hilton points to Hoovers.com, and Radisson points to pubcrawler.com for example.

Google needs to cross reference the YP matches with a list of URLS with latlong information in order to show www.hilton.com and www.radisson.com for the hotels Hilton and Radisson.

Of course I am bias as I provide this list of URLS and physical locations. :)

As an interesting note, only 3% of web pages by count are from websites with a physical location (retail or business), and 97% are not. Until you can separate these results, the majority of results will be from sites which are not physically located in the area.

Initially our business plan was to sell geosigns aka Verisigns which would certify the geographic location for a business and would be free to all search engines to use to help provide valid results. The Internet crash and lack of any interest for local search in 2000 caused this to be abandoned in favor of our current business plan. The nice thing about Geosigns are that they are spam proof. A business cannot show up for a seach for 'widgets pasadena' unless they are in pasadena, and its unlikely someone will rent an office, get a phone, arrange mail delivery just to spoof a search engine.

PS At least a local search will help the query 'Paris Hilton' be much more relevant

Tim Nye
The Local Search Guy

PS If this is considered a plug - I apologize but I wanted to give a reference to this url list being available to prove it a viable solution. Feel free to edit me :)