The company that I work for has a couple of different local search IYP products used by quite a few publishers, and we’ve hit some of the same challenges. For example, one advertiser – an insurance agent would show up when anyone searched for schools. After scratching our heads for a minute, we looked at the data and saw that the YP ad talked about how one of his specialties was that he would “school the uninformed about insurance”. Great, but not what you want when you’re looking for the local elementary…

The folks at TrueLocal should realize that people search for themselves or industries that are familiar with first.

Thus, marketers might run a test for the word “marketing” and the results should NOT include the Boston Market despite that it’s a great place to have lunch and discuss marketing!

Hopefully this is taken as constructive criticism. I wish them well.

In a recent data update, we had a wee glitch that was complicated by a simultaneous change to our algorithm. The end result being the strange search results shown here – and those that Simon mentioned. The problem was diagnosed immediately but because we’re dealing with 14 million business listings the solution takes a bit of time. TrueLocal takes data quality very seriously so we’re taking a cautious approach versus rushing to apply a band-aid solution. We expect everything will be resolved by the end of the week.

I’d also like to clarify that those logoed listings aren’t ‘featured listings’ in the sense of paid advertisers but are a by-product of TrueLocal’s FranDat (Franchise Dataset) product that allows us to collapse multiple nearby locations into one listing in the results. I should also mention that this problem is limited to TrueLocal.com and does not affect our Data Services products.

Colin Carmichael
Director, Product Development
TrueLocal

It’s a shame, there is a real need for a site for local consumers to trust and there is plenty of opportunity for a vertical to be better than the majors are at local.