What's Wrong with Local Search Sites
July 16, 2008 | In: Collaborative Filtering, Local Search, theSUGGESTR
What’s Wrong with Local Search?
The local search market has become saturated with sites that basically do the same thing. They allow users to comment on places, give them ratings, sometimes tag them and if your lucky provide additional data that is useful about a local business. While this does generate a ton of content the problem is the quality and accuracy of the content is questionable at best. Often a review will contain many contradicting opinions, and why shouldn’t it, everyone’s tastes and experiences are different. My opinion of a great steak house is probably different than that a vegetarian.
There are lots of reasons why a person may like or dislike a given business, especially restaurants. The majority of the current local search sites don’t provide any personalization when it comes to the searches and results performed by their users. Two users with opposite tastes will get the same results if they enter the same search. Even more troubling is when reviewing the 100’s of reviews posted for some of the most popular business the user is often left to decide if they want to read the one that says that the restaurant is the “best place ever” or the one that says that the “service was horrible.”
Most sites do not provide any way to easily distinguish which user’s reviews are most likely to be shared by you! We believe, as do others, that the future of local search is not really search at all but personalized suggestions.
We’ll lay out our vision for local suggestions in a couple of days.
4 Responses to What's Wrong with Local Search Sites
Andrew Shotland
July 16th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Totally agree with you. The problem is I don’t think either model (social net WOM v. anon reviews) works well. It all suffers from too much info and/or not enough.
fmapap
July 16th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
The general nature of these sites are flawed in that for most people to get the energy up to comment on a meal they had they need incentive. Either the meal was really horrible and they wan’t to complain OR they know the owner
There are others that do it just for fun but they have no incentive to be honest – they tend to exeggerate how good or bad a place is.
We’ll be posting our approach to this in a day or so, but the key thing is that we provide incentive to be honest since your ratings (as a user) determine how accurate our recommendations will be. Not to say our approach is perfect but we do think it is better.
Thanks for the comment.
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