NY Times on Local

Found via Screenwerk.

The New York Times ran an article yesterday on local search. It’s interesting to me because of what it says is missing from local search: quantity. Not quantity in the number of competitors, but quantity in the number of reviews. The thinking is that it takes a large number of reviews to generate a trustworthy opinion. I would have to agree and disagree with that. Even if there are a large number of reviews, what are the chances that these reviews represent the average opinion of a customer of these businesses? I’ve accounted for that exact problem in two ways on Lopico.

First, reviews are not the core of the site. The core of the site is the listings and the votes. Before a business is even listed, someone has to take the effort to add it to the site; essentially giving the first endorsement that this is a quality business. Then the businesses are voted for, this is what really separates Lopico. It is very easy to see with one look what the best places in a city are (really only in Akron right now and a little in the other popular cities), at least much easier than other sites make it. To me reviews are an after thought, not the focus. If you want more info, check the reviews, but if you just want the mass of opinions, you don’t have to read anything. Voting is a lot easier to do than writing a review and also a lot easier for the information seeker to decipher.

Secondly, I’ve accepted the fact that reviews are going to be either really strong for or against, and have created a review system that requires a reviewer to think about both sides. I’m gong to do even more in the future in terms of user ratings but for now, the combination of votes, user experience ranking and balanced reviews is working just fine.

The Lopico account system just launched, so I don’t have a large enough user base yet (anymore?) to really compete on mass, but as it grows I believe Lopico will emerge as one of the most, if not the most, valuable resource for finding local businesses. I’ll add to that, that since Lopico relaunched on the 24th (almost two weeks ago), the site has not yet been fully reindexed on all Search Engines, in fact only about 6 cities (3%) are indexed right now (and only on Google), yet I’ve ranked first for almost 700 keywords or phrases, and close enough to the top to generate clicks on even more queries. And, these aren’t just one page view clicks, the average number of page views is around 5, with the top ranking query producing over 200 page views. That may not seem like that much, but without being indexed, search really isn’t that big of a factor right now. I’m not as bold as Barry Diller, but I think that’s a decent start.