October 21, 2003

In the first part of my series on local searching, I looked at the poor state of results that appear when someone does a local search on general purpose search engines and Overture's new paid listings system that aims to improve the situation for both users and advertisers. In this part, I'll focus on the crawler-based methods being used by Google and Mobilemaps to improve local searching when tapping into a web-wide database of content. Called Google Search By Location, the service allows you to query across the entire web and retrieve results that match the subject you're interested in and which are also deemed relevant to a particular geographic area that you specify. Results are shown both in traditional "list style" and mapped visually.

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