I Want to Search By Neighborhood Name!

Nate Elliott | October 17, 2007, 02:05 PM

In researching my new report on Local Search in Europe, one of the biggest problems I found was that European search engines all provide such varied levels of support for users who search local terms within general search engines.

I did a little local search testing on four leading German search engines: Google.de, Yahoo.de, MSN.de, and GMX.de. I used the general search engines for each local query, not the local search engines (because that's what most users do), and I searched for "italienische restaurant 10405" (because I like pizza, and because that's my postcode here in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin). Each search engine responded to that query in very different ways: Google did best, providing a map and addresses and phone numbers; Yahoo offered addresses and phone numbers but no map; GMX came back with cool neighborhood search clusters but no maps or phone numbers; and MSN didn't offer any specialized local information at all.

But not only do the engines respond to local queries in different ways, they each accepted different kinds of local queries as well. Google, for some reason, doesn't recognize neighborhood names as a local search trigger. So while Google provided the best local support of any search engine when I asked for "italienische restaurant 10405," it provided no local search support at all when I asked for "italienische restaurant prenzlauer berg."

Faced with this kind of inconsistency, no wonder Europeans don't use local search very often: less than one-half of European online users tell us they've ever searched for local information on a search engine or online yellow pages. And as a result, there's not much local search traffic for marketers to target, and so the vast majority of European search marketers have never used local targeting for their paid search campaigns either.

Jupiter clients can read the further details, including country-by-country breakouts on consumers' use of local search, in the full report.