Local Search quick hits
Couple things missed in the craziness that this week has already become….
At HitWise, LeeAnn Prescott
Over the past year, the market share of US visits to the top 5 yellow pages sites has declined by 7%, while visits to the next-generation local search sites have increased: for March 2007 versus March 2006, visits to Google Maps/Local were up 70%, Yahoo! Local up 20%, Local.com up 29%, and Windows Live Local arrived on the scene.
All of that was a preview of a local search session at the Web 2.0 expo; oddly, I haven’t seen any post-session coverage of what happened.
…..
At AskCity, the blogging team is again sharing sample data showing how the service is being used. No surprise that restaurants and hotels top the list of business searches. There’s one important industry not listed in AskCity’s top ten, which I saw some time ago while putting together a post about local search behavior that has yet to see the light of day. I won’t mention that industry, just in case I ever finish that post. 🙂
[tags]local search, askcity[/tags]
What do you think is the reason the traffic for yellow pages is down? I am trying to compare this situation with Poland. In Poland we do not have neither Maps/Local nor Yahoo Local, so the competition for yellow pages company is lower.
My guess is that the yellow pages sites are too “old school” and the younger, hip crowd does their local search at places like Yelp which have all those Web 2.0 community features.
I see your point. Right now evan in Poland Social Media is growing very fast, we have something similar to Digg.com, MySpace.com. There is no site, which could be similar to Yelp or Zillow.com, but it is just matter of time.