Tuesday, June 3. 2008

Biggest Day in Cell Phone Nav use? Day before Mother's Day

That's the word from Networks in Motion, which measured close to five million navigation requests. Besides directions people searched for florists and restaurants.

- TWICE

Thursday, May 29. 2008

Combatting MapSpam

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land has an interview with Google's Director of Product Management for Local, Carter Maslan about MapSpam, that is inappropriate listings appearing in local searches. Bottom line: they are working on it. Most interesting comment:

SEL: What about cases where people want to appear in results for areas where they don't have a physical location (e.g., a "service area"). Is Google going to address that scenario?
CM: Yes, we will. We currently don't allow for service areas, but we recognize that many businesses don't have physical locations and are working to accommodate those businesses. We recommend that businesses without a physical location register themselves as a single business listing using a PO Box.

Wednesday, May 14. 2008

Cell Tower Locating Coming to India Sparking LBS

Apparently the use of cell towers to locate cell phones is still very new in India. LiveMint (part of the Wall Street Journal) reports on Yalup, one of the first players to use the technology and its database of some businesses 150,000 in Bangalore alone to offer local search on cell phones. While the company is anticipating competition from Google, Microsoft and Nokia, the CEO claims its local data will help distinguish it.

Interestingly, the searches offered will use a static radius of 800 meters. "The listings you find would be (of those establishments) within a 800m (radius) of where you are located," says Gundaiah Sridhar, the 25-year-old chief executive officer of Yulop Websense Solutions Pvt. Ltd."

Tuesday, May 13. 2008

Podcast: Four Technologies That May Soon Impact Geospatial...Are You Ready?

The editors look outward to find technologies that will impact how geospatial products and practices will change in the next 12 to 24 months. Some of the suggested technologies are already appearing in cutting edge products, others are not yet implemented in geospatial solutions, but we expect to see them soon.

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Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index with all the info.

Friday, April 25. 2008

What gets a local box in Google and what does not?

I don't spend too much time playing with local search on any site, but Scott Buresh, an SEO person does. He offered this observation in an article at Promotion World.

It should be noted that you will not see local search results for all queries that contain a local modifier. If you type in "Atlanta search engine optimization," for example, you will not see the geographic box. Google somehow "knows" when a geographic modifier really means that you only offer services in a particular area. In effect, it has figured out an algorithm that separates the businesses that are dealing with a local clientele versus those that are located in a particular geographic region but service a national, or multinational, clientele. Yeah, those guys are pretty good.

Only one problem: if you do that query, you DO get local results. So, Google isn't all that smart after all. Frankly, I didn't believe his contention, which is why I tried it out. But, I'll give the author benefit of the doubt: perhaps when he last did the query, it didn't spawn a local results map. I really wonder how Google decides what returns a local search and what does not?

Monday, March 24. 2008

The Ultimate News Search Map

It took a while to get here and many news sites and hackers have put together lesser implementations along the way, but Geosearch News is finally here.

MetaCarta's "demo" provides what may be the best geographic search tool for the largest changing digital data database of unstructured content on the planet. The site offers search by content and geography. And while at the smallest scales just AP and Reuters stories are offered, as you "zoom in" (either via map or keying in geography) more and more sources' stories appear on the map (some 1400 at last count). And, remember this is MetaCarta's "smart" geospatial searching, so it relies on extracting location information outside the first sentence and distinguishing Paris, France from Paris, Texas. It also know about "points of interest." That means each story can be "located" in more than one place. It also means that stories seemingly in unrelated geographies may pop up in a search.

I searched on my city, outside Boston and "run" hoping to find stories on running races in the last 24 hours. (You can set time parameters for up to month into the past.) I found a story from the Asbury Park Press (AP) about "State Police chief goes to Harvard." Why? The keyword "place" is noted as Kennedy School of Government as noted in this sentence: "The head of the New Jersey State Police, Col. Rick Fuentes, was among a select group of law enforcement professionals chosen for the Kennedy School of Government's Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety, a three-year working group that started this year." And, this sentence has the word "run": "Any time you run a major institution like the State Police, there is no question you have problems and concerns," Milgram said. "I hope Col. Fuentes and I will be measured against how we respond to those problems and concerns." In short, you need to be a good searcher to get what you want. But, that's true of any sort of search.

The source of each story is noted in the list of articles returned from a search. But sometimes those sources are quite cryptic such as "feeds.feedburner.com." I had to click through to the story to learn the source. Another challenge, be careful about searching too far back in time; some articles are "no longer available."One more challenge: there's limited help available - just an FAQ.

Still, there are some goodies hidden within! If you stay at the small scale and click on AP and Reuters articles, the full text appears in a new tab, in the app. And, there's a bonus with the AP/Reuters stories: every location in the article is put on a summary map called "Places in this Article" below which other stories from those wire services for those geographies appear. MetaCarta has a formal relationship with these wire services. Article from other sources, with which MetaCarta does not have such relationships, such as the New Jersey paper above, open in a new browser window without those goodies.

The app uses Google Maps as a front end, but any renderer could be used. Last time I saw it, it used Virtual Earth.

MetaCarta offers GeoSearch News to show off its technology and perhaps, to become the center of news searches. This is a quite powerful app, with lots of sources. Still, it takes some time to master.