Local Search: Images Bring Your Yellow Pages Search to Life

According to a few recent surveys, over 30% of all commercial searches are categorized as local searches. That is, the searcher is limiting the search based on a geographic parameter such as city, zip code or neighborhood. The local search engine market should continue to grow rapidly in importance as MSN, Yahoo and Google all now provide local search capability.

A9 is taking an interesting step in local search by taking images of brick and mortar storefronts. If you search for "pizza" in Denver, CO, the results come back with a list of pizza restaurants and images of their store and surrounding area.

A9 has taken over 26 million images in 15 major cities. Someone actually drives a truck by each of the businesses with a camera mounted on top. Proprietary software and GPS automatically takes and catalogs the images.

This is pretty interesting stuff. What happens, though, if your business is located in a shopping mall or high-rise? They don't say. Perhaps you'll soon notice people walking around these locations with small cameras affixed to their heads. Maybe this will be a good business opportunity for someone to recruit the "mall walkers" who get their exercise by walking laps in the mall...