You can find my personalized easter message here

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Some fun for the Easter weekend

Blogger now supports Geotagging.
Wanted to share this one as it is an approach to make everything more local and apply some metadata to information on the web, trying to structure it. One of the important things of the semantic web; structured information.
They even made it easy for you; enter your location or browse the map, easy japanesey! The location will also appear in your RSS feed.

Hooray for more structured data!
Did you know Google is already showing attempts of structured data in the Search Engine Result Pages?
Try a search for ‘Queen of the Netherlands‘ and you will notice that Google is using taxonomies (Queen: Beatrix) on unstructured data.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Blogger now supports Geotagging

Mozilla Geode, Making browsers local
News has, that Mozilla will be launching a Firefox add-on, called Geode, that will enable the browser to enable localized content.

This is again, one of the signs that we’re moving towards a more local web, with even the major players (Google, Yahoo, Apple) tooling up to provide and handle with geolocation information with software like Gears, open location databases and GPS enabled devices like the iphone and Android.

Having a browser that is location aware, enables a lot of possibilities including context-awareness (personalized, localized) features. Above all it should increase relevance, for example in Search, providing locally relevant results (hmm, wait, wasn’t google supporting these guys? ).

Mozilla Labs is doing cool stuff lately. their Ubiquity tool is a good example of this. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow for more news about Geode. In the mean while you can take a look at the website of VentureBeat where they show some early screenshots. I don’t have a clue how the tool exactly will be working, but it does remind me a bit of Fire Eagle. Now will this plugin also change the way we use local?

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Mozilla be launching Geode – Browsers get Local

OK, officially it’s not available for people outside US and UK, although comments on the announcement by Google have said it’s available in other countries as well. But Google Mobile Search now has gotten more local. Where at first, or before, you were able to receive ‘locally relevant results’ based on your IP address or sometimes your postal code, you are now able to get them using the MyLocation feature on windows mobile phones. It uses the Google Gears Geolocation API, as seen in Google Maps mobile. Your location is pinpointed with help of Cell-IDs. The results are shown in the form of universal search results as Greg Sterling pointed out in his article on Search Engine Land.

I’ve already seen, depending on your operator/service provider, that the accuracy can be within 200 meters. Which I believe opens up enormous possibilities for small businesses providing local results. Even more reason to start optimizing your website and adding your data to the local business center!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Mobile Search now gets more local

Google just introduced their Google suggest feature on all search engines. Although I find this feature helpful and promising, it doesn’t follow their philosophy:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.

I tried some keyword searches and noticed how often Google suggest tries to give you local results. Almost each (local) search will give you suggestions with geomodifiers (locations).
Now here’s the screenshot:

So why do I think it fails? Well, imagine this. I’m living in Barcelona at the moment, I am using Google Netherlands and it serves me with local relevant results which seem to be all in the United States except for London. Despite all the effort Google puts in providing cool geolocation APIs for developers and even determining your own location on a map, they didn’t think of using this same feature to improve their Google suggest feature? Why do you think Google made this decision? Do you think they will implement this in the future?

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google suggest fails on Google philosophy