Comments on: Local Search – consolidation coming soon?

By: K Lindley

K Lindley — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 03:16:10 +0000

Local search needs to be adapted in my opinion soley for the reason that we all(I) hate having the yellow page directories in my home. And besides, I’m getting too old to read them

I have personally used the Local.com site many times and find it extremely reliable to give me an accurate and comprehensive search of only what I want. For instance, I broke my eyeglasses so I went to the repair shop that had repaired the years ago, however they were no longer at that location . Local.com
brought the company up in the 1st five results and furnished a map detailing the new location.

Three days ago my son needed a windsheild replaced before he could get his car inspected. He called me on the phone to ask what he should do and before we finished our conversation he had directions to the closest business that replaced autoglass at a resonable price.

I have used no other search engine that give a more reliable search results for ANY given city than Local.com………….. KDL

By: jda

jda — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:36:29 +0000

442 reviews for Yelp, my guess is 443 is not going to add much to the conversation.

Quality is a part of what I was trying to get at, and I’m sure something like what you’re working on at iBegin will go a long way to that end. We’ll see.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:31:45 +0000

Oh yeah – Yelp, InsiderPages, and Judy’s Book have all paid for users to add reviews.

I disagree with having too many reviews. The problem is too many crappy reviews. Reviews where people talk about stuff when they don’t really know what they are talking about. I also argue that a lot of reviews being pushed on sites like Yelp are more towards trendyness than of actual value. Eg Yelp.com itself has over 400 reviews, and one of the latest reviews points out the mob-mentality: read

What we need (and we are starting to formulate this on iBegin) is a system that tells you how close a reviewer is to your own tastes. Eg if you see a review on Red Lobster. Some people may give it 5 out of 5, while others may give it 2 out of 5. By matching the reviewers and your own other reviews, it would be possible for the platform to state which review is most relevant to you.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

By: jda

jda — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:15:26 +0000

The problem as I see it, is that data from other regular people just isn’t that interesting. I hear a lot of people say ‘none of these sites have enough reviews’ but that’s not what really matters. In fact I think you can have too many reviews. I’d rather see only a handful of reviews from people that actually know what they’re talking about. Yelp is considered the golden boy, but I’d say 98% of the reviews on Yelp are meaningless. And Yelp pays something like $10/review in some areas of the country… which seems to mean that it’s not as hot as everyone claims.