Grayboxx Launches
New local search destination Grayboxx launched today in its first locality of Burlington, VT. As mentioned in Grayboxx: A Sneak Peek, the site will have a staggered launch starting in small towns and cities where it believes it has a competitive edge over other local search destinations that focus more on larger metros (see rollout schedule here).
The source of this competitive edge is its ranking algorithm for businesses that is built on “implicit reviews.” This pulls together consumer activity to glean votes of confidence in businesses, and accordingly ranks businesses in quantitative measures. The key is that this “preference scoring” formulates rankings for businesses in categories and locales that don’t garner enough explicit reviews (traditional narrative reviews generated on sites like Yelp), such as plumbers in small towns.
“It’s an algorithmic and scalable way to rank businesses, not just restaurants and night life but every category. And the nice thing about that is that we have results just as well in Moscow, ID, and Bridgeport, CT, as we do in Chicago,” CEO Bob Chandra told me. He added: “Places like Yelp are social networks for foodies. I’d love to see a social network for people interested in plumbers.”
(click image to expand)
This is a nice point of differentiation for Grayboxx — something that is definitely required in the hyper-competitive local search world. It will utilize this to attract viewers, but as mentioned in the previous post, it could also provide the technology and/or the ratings content to other local search sources such as IYPs.
This is the classic destination vs. platform distinction. It could attempt to be both, but for now is primarily a destination. The destination experience itself is different and, to me, useful. However, it requires that you type in a ZIP code for Burlington, VT, but doesn’t allow you to type in the city name. This requires a separate search to find out Burlington’s ZIP code if you don’t know it (I’ll save you the trip, use 05401). I imagine this will change though.
Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.
7 Comments
This is all great in theory but they have a “black box” algorithm that we are just suppose to
believe in. They need to show how the algorithm really work in order to have creditbility and
make thier rankings more of a science based vs. a faith based.
I agree with Tom. My big question is where are they getting the data for their algorithm? Are they going to the actual business and asking for sales info?
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BIA/Kelsey Blog ? Grayboxx Launches…
The Kelsey Group provides regular studies on small and medium-sized enterprises and on users, advertisers and consumers/businesses-from benchmarking data and comparative metrics, to segmentation analysis to support business and sales-planning activitie…
BIA/Kelsey Blog ? Grayboxx Launches…
The Kelsey Group provides regular studies on small and medium-sized enterprises and on users, advertisers and consumers/businesses-from benchmarking data and comparative metrics, to segmentation analysis to support business and sales-planning activitie…
i like to see animal sex…………………………………………………………………………………………………
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