Introducing localguides.com: local, meet social. social, meet vertical.
We've just launched the beta version of a brand spanking new site - localguides.com. — We think the site (and the technology and methodologies behind it) begin to lay the foundation to tackle two vexing problems in local search …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Ask.com sketched what it called the new shape of local search in a March 2007 blog post, Evans Ink has put its own answer on the table: localguides.com, now in beta. Where the engine-side debate centered on restructuring results, LocalGuides attacks the problem from the content side, betting that community-authored, vertically organized guides can fix what generic listings cannot.
The pitch — 'local, meet social, meet vertical' — matters because it treats local search's two chronic gaps (thin content and one-size-fits-all categories) as solvable with user contribution plus structure rather than more crawling. No other outlet picked the launch up at the time, so reception is still an open question.
First-order effects
- LocalGuides enters a local search market that established players were already actively rethinking in early 2007, positioning its social-plus-vertical model directly against the structural approaches the major engines were describing.
Second-order effects
- If community-authored guides prove they can cover businesses and places more richly than structured listings alone, incumbent local search providers face pressure to layer user contribution onto their own directory data.
Third-order effects
- The launch points toward local search competing on who produces the content rather than who indexes it — a shift from crawl-and-list economics toward community-maintained place knowledge.
The trend: Local search is moving from static, engine-crawled business directories toward socially authored, vertically organized guides, with startups and incumbents converging on the same content-supply problem.