Interesting all this chatter about Local.com's local search patent. Honestly, and this is self-serving, but is local search ever going to be about crawling web sites for relevance? Do we really need to craw a web site and find an address to make a business "local"? And what do these patents say about availability and relevance? How do they measure "quality of service"? Local search is broken; needs to thrown out like an old phone book and replaced with a completely new approach.
Local Search Bonanza Stirs Patent Investigation: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
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Web search is already known to account for website performance/bandwidth as a ranking factor. Incorporating phone availability into the local search algorithm is an interesting angle, however the answering rate is probably more of a boolean threshold.
Indeed, a business that infrequently (or never) answers the phone should be discounted when the user intends on calling. The approach is sound, but actively obtaining that data in scale is key. Obviously crawling doesn't validate that a company is actually alive and kicking; wonder if the telco's would be willing to share that data...
Best regards,
David Rodecker
President, RelevantAds
“getting local business online”
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