Recently, I've answered the question "What do you write about?" with "Not coupons." It's not that I don't like a deal (who doesn't?), but that coupons are coupons and aren't technologically interesting. Backyard, a self-described "scrappy young startup" showed today at the Launch conference and gives their users "relevant & valuable information about deals in their area."

Normally, this is the sort of thing that would fall into the realm of what I don't write about, but CEO Steve Espinosa showed me that Backyard has something different to offer. By working with Facebook Connect, the site immediately works to use demographic data to cater not only the look of the site, but also determine what sort of results you see. Consider it a personalized sort of Yelp search engine.

"If you like rap, we'll likely direct you to a club," said Espinosa. "If you like rock, we'll probably send you somewhere else."

Backyard helps the user interpret results, showing a percentage on each that indicates how much higher or lower the price for the service there is compared to the average of all results. Where does Backyard get its results? A combination of sources, from Yahoo Local to Yelp reviews to Facebook data.

Backyard also does one other little thing - it has actual people confirm things like price and hours of happy hours, Taco Tuesdays and other sorts of things, meaning that when you get these search results, you can be sure that when you ask for a happy hour right now, it isn't a happy hour that used to exist three years ago. And when you click through to an individual business's page, you can see an aggregate of Yelp reviews, this verified contact, pricing and hour data, and even add it to your Foursquare to-do list.

Beyond that, Backyard really might be just another "Where's a good bar/salon/restaurant" app like any other, but the idea of cartering search results according to my demographics sets it apart.

What makes these new results more user-friendly is the fact that Google now clusters related results together. The new results are marked with a red pin and feature direct links to relevant review sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Zagat, Urbanspoon and TripAdvisor. Whenever possible, Google will also select a relevant quote from one of these reviews and display it right on the search results page. Google notes that a standard Place Search results page now features between 30 and 40 relevant links. The company claims that in its tests, Place Search saved users "an average of two seconds on searches for local information."

These new pages actually look quite a bit like Bing's local search results, though Bing does not display these by default whenever it detects a local search.

The service was announced today on the Google Lat/Long Blog, in a post written by Project Manager Kiley McEvoy. McEvoy joined Google three years ago after getting a Masters in Information Engineering, Theoretical Cognitive Neuroscience & Engineering at Dartmouth.

Boost appears aimed at turning Google advertising for local businesses from a complex art often hired-out to specialist consultants into a turn-key technology with far less friction than non-technical business owners experience today.

The use of artificial intelligence to determine keyword and bid recommendations is a very logical extension Google's core competency and likely to fit within the brand expectations of small business owners.

As a program of Google Places, Boost could offer substantial monetization that would enable Places to experiment with other innovative location-based technologies outside of advertising. Consulting analyst firm PSFK has identified what it calls Pre-View, real-time data and video served up from local shops, as a key part of the future of retail, for example. Experiments or acquisitions in that field could be made all the more feasible by a fat pipeline of revenue produced by local advertising made easier through automation.

Two weeks ago, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search product and user experience at Google, announced she was changing jobs to focus on local search and location technologies.

A major new monetization technology, combined with a transfer of substantial leadership, could position Google to extend its early major lead in local and location - a tech sector expected to explode in importance with the rise of mobile and other connected devices.

Until now, this setting was hidden behind a number of rather cryptic steps ("View customizations," "Change location"). Now, as Google's Mack Lu notes, Google has become so much better at displaying locally relevant information that "it felt like the right time to make this setting easier to find."

This, of course, is only a minor change, but Google clearly thinks that local search will be a major growth area and the fact that Marissa Mayer just moved from Google's search products division (where she was the VP and often the company's public face of Google) to managing the company's location-centric products is another example for this.

Image credit: Flickr user Nancy-.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_gives_you_more_control_over_your_location.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_gives_you_more_control_over_your_location.php News Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:11:35 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Gilad Elbaz's last company was acquired by Google and became AdSense, the source of 30% of Google's revenue. His new company, Factual, is a marketplace for live, collaboratively and algorithmically maintained bulk data. This month Factual has announced that it now offers read and write access to 14 million U.S. business listings and locations - for free.

Gigaom's Liz Gannes called the offering "a great place database in the sky." Adam Duvander at ProgrammableWeb said it was "a first step toward creating a place database to which anyone can contribute...extremely valuable to developers." What makes this data offering so exciting? The ability to cross-reference it with any other location data that you already have and create something new.

The write access that Factual provides offers a solution to the problem of accuracy, the company says. Gannes explains that Factual "combines data from partners, vendors and users, and applies machine learning to extract and validate facts -- for instance, to determine what the actual current phone number is for a business." (See also our review of Factual's basic offering from October.)

A mobile "what's near me" app is just the most obvious use case, though. Such data could really be put to use in enriching any existing bit of location data. The Factual data set includes fields beyond name, latitude, longitude and adress - it's also got phone numbers, whether a business delivers food, whether it serves alcohol and much more.

The Real World, Mashed Into Apps

Imagine any of those fields being cross referenced with any other location data you've got.

• Full bars with the highest Yelp rating within a quarter mile of any movie theatre.
• Family-friendly restaurants within a mile of every historic landmark in the country, for those weekend educational trips with the kids.
• 24-hour restaurants nearest any musical venue.

Every one of those mashups of location data is a Web or mobile app that people would use, aren't they? Those are just a few quick ideas.

The data set needs filling out beyond the basics; many of the fields beyond location and phone number hold sparse data right now. But the potential, the price (free), the pedigree and the programmability of this offering are all very promising.

Location as a platform, cross-referenced with place, time, people and content, could be a big part of the future of our computing experience. The first step is to get the data about what is where into as many hands as possible.

"Hopefully," Elbaz says on his very narrative LinkedIn profile, "high-quality, lower or no cost data will unleash a wave of creativity and productivity by application developers and content publishers."

Searching for local businesses on Yahoo now brings up a nice interface containing reviews, an overview, photos and driving directions inside a drop down box you can access without leaving the page you're on. It's a smoother user experience than Google or Bing offers and Yahoo may have more local business information than either of those two competitors can offer in-house as well.

The new Yahoo local search presentation is much more informative than what Bing offers and it's more graceful than what Google offers. Even on local searches where Google does have a lot of information, you often have to click over to a Google Maps page to learn more about a particular business. Removing that one pageload makes a big difference in a single user's experience - multiply that by millions and millions of people searching and this little change is a pretty big deal.

Presumably it will be replaced with Bing soon. Bing will no doubt improve, perhaps it will leverage some of what Yahoo! has already, but on face it seems like another loss of innovation and quality user experience due to trouble with monetization.

Great for Cities - But not for Sights

While this worked quite well for the examples Google gives in its blog post, a few of our other searches ('Yosemite National Park' for example), did not bring up any photos. Any search for a city, however, always gave us related images from the photo layer in Google Maps. Searches for local restaurants and sites typically don't bring up any images and searches for local sights already brought up search results from Google Images anyway, and from what we can see, nothing has changed there.

It's nice to see, however, that Google now surfaces more images. It is also worth pointing out that yesterday, Google also announced that users can now easily filter Google Images by Creative Commons license, which, until now, was really the domain of Yahoo's Flickr, which hosts the world's largest repository of CC-licensed images.

Competing With Bing

Of course, we also can't help but think that the fact that Google is facing renewed competition from Bing, which also does a nice job of mixing up images with local search results - though not quite as nicely as Google now does. Travel is one of the areas where Bing excels, and it is good to see that the competition in this market is driving all players to innovate and improve their services.

As usual, RWW Live will be hosted by Sean Ammirati. Our guests are:

• Dennis Crowley from the previously mentioned Four Square (iTunes link). Check out ReadWriteWeb's review of Four Square. Before that, Dennis was co-founder of Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google.
• Tom Coates, from Yahoo! (creator of Fire Eagle). See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Fire Eagle's go-live.
• Mark Josephson CEO at Outside.in. See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of Outside.in.

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is now available for listening to here.

These are very welcome changes that really help take advantage of the eye candy that is Street View in Google Maps. There's a whole lot of changes that were made today, all with the long-term fight for map users and their ad-viewing eyeballs in mind we're sure. Today's changes are great, though.

Map search is a heated competition between Google, Microsoft, MapQuest (now with OpenID, by the way) and a handful of other consumer market competitors. That competition goes on in both features like this and in image quality.

Why invest time and resources into making map search interfaces better? Because someday this is expected to be a very commercialized part of search. Once this kind of experience becomes widely available on touch-screen mobile devices, expect to see ads all over and even more innovation come to online mapping.