ReadWriteWeb

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.

Remember when Google launched Tags, a local advertising up-sell aimed at local small businesses? Companies like Yelp and YellowPages certainly do, and they've joined a few other local directory sites in launching a competing product by the same name.

Techcrunch reports that about a dozen sites, all feeling the heat from Google's potentially disruptive move into local advertising, have teamed up with a startup called Yext to mount a defensive challenge against the search Titan with their own version of Tags.

Google is putting a strong emphasis on local search lately and today, the company is launching Place Search, which will give you a more comprehensive view of local search results whenever Google's algorithms detect that you are performing a search for local information. A new "Places" link in the sidebar will also make this feature available when Google doesn't automatically display the new results page. Google is rolling Place Search out globally now, though it will take a few days before it is available everywhere.

Google announced initial availability of a new advertising program called Boost today, beginning in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. Boost automatically determines what keywords your business ought to bid on and recommends a range of monthly advertising budgets based on the competitiveness of your business sector. It then runs Cost Per Click ads in Google search and Maps for the recommended keywords.

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.

Google's algorithms take your current location into account when choosing which results to display for searches where your location is relevant. Until now, though, it was rather hard to know where exactly Google thought you were and sometimes Google just doesn't get it right. Starting today, Google will make it easier to see where it thinks you are and to change your location settings manually.

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.

In an effort to encourage more business owners to take advantage of its Tags advertising program, Google Places is offering a 30-day trial to users who sign up by July 23.

The Tags program was one of a handful of features rolled out in April when Google revamped its Local Business Center and re-branded it as Google Places as part of a larger push to capture more local searches and advertising dollars.

Oh, the irony. One day after it was announced that Microsoft's Bing will be replacing Yahoo's own search engine on Yahoo.com, Yahoo! came out with a new local search functionality that ought to be the envy of every search engine.

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.

This morning, Google announced that it will now display images next to some local search results. For the last two years, Google generally showed a map as the first item on the search results page whenever a user searched for a location, but now, a grid with six pictures will also appear next to this map as well. These images come right from the Panoramio photo layer in Google Maps, and clicking on it brings up Google Maps with the photo layer.

One of the big trends on the web is more and more location aware / sensitive web applications. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are enabling this. In the latest episode of RWW Live, today at 3.30pm PST, we'll talk about how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still in the way. We'll also talk about privacy and other user concerns and what is being done to address them. We have special guests from Yahoo! Fire Eagle, Four Square and Outside.in on the show today.