CitySearch Takes a Page From Google Playbook

Quietly Expanding It's Reach

[martinibuster]

The Washington Post unveiled it's redesigned website, giving CitySearch prominent placement in it's Arts and Entertainment Section-Not Overture, not Google; CitySearch.

Taking a page out of Google's playbook, CS has acquired a huge amount of information that surpasses ANYTHING anybody else can deliver. Now they are licensing it. It's a brilliant move. CitySearch as destination? Eh- CitySearch powering newspapers across the country? Looks like Google prior to the Yahoo deal.

About the revamped Arts and Culture section, the DM News had this to say [dmnews.com]:

Powered by CitySearch, it lets users look for everything from bookstores to bars to restaurants. Results also feature editorial and user reviews.

"Our users told us that search is really important to them, especially for entertainment," said... a washingtonpost.com spokesman. "We've really put the search on steroids for that."

The only problem with this is, how an WE make money off this? Perhaps it could help the web designer.

And that's the problem. There's not enough pie to go around and it's hard to start breathing heavy about that.

[jeremy goodrich]

Good onya, CitySearch. Now that they've done so well at content syndication, perhpas we can work on the angle you pointed out -> how does this help _us_ webmasters make more $$$?

Well, if their fees are low enough, you could syndicate their stuff & add value to your site, stickiness, etc, etc.

Other ideas?

[martinibuster]

Ooooh! Syndication... That can be another "kaching" for travel sites, something to add to the aff and adsense revenue.

[jeremy goodrich]

Roll in CitySearch, the XML database for XYZ widget that sells wonderfully in a geo targeted market, and say hello to new Adsense & affiliate revenue ;)

Nice. Any other ideas?

[HughMungus]

CitySearch came up in the "Local Search" topic earlier this month and really points out one of the problems with many search engines -- the inability to find information about local businesses.

Adsense-type local advertising ads. They should do that. So if you type something into a search, local business ads come up next to the web page adsense ads. Hmm...