Yahoo! Local just integrated a drawing tool that lets users specify a radius within which to filter results. AskCity has a similar drawing tool (with additional shapes), and Urban Mapping has a platform that does this. On the advertiser side, AdWords and a few other SEM platforms allow marketers to specify where to serve their ads (by IP address).

We see this as a nice user-centric feature that will attract a certain set of power users in the highly competitive and quickly developing online mapping space. Different local searches carry with them different geographic relevance and implications for distance. I might be willing to travel 100 miles for a car, but I don’t want to go more than a few blocks to buy batteries. And with plumbers, roofers, landscapers and other trade services, distance hardly matters (beyond service area considerations) because they are coming to your house.

Building local/mapping products that include all these categories is a challenge because it’s difficult to apply different rules across categories for how mapping results are shown and what distance is relevant for what search (one reason why vertically segmented sites like Zillow, Trulia and AutoTrader have delivered more meaningful experiences to many users). Yahoo!’s new tool takes the guesswork out of it by allowing users to specify on the fly, literally, how far they’re willing to go.

Just a quick note to point out that UMI’s geotargeted keyword generation tool (among other things) has launched today. Details of the platform and the concept behind it are in our past write-up (scroll).

Local retailers are increasingly going beyond store locators to drive sales. The extensions to store locators include brand locators, coupons, menus, trip planners, and even guides to where Wi-Fi, nonsmoking and RV parking can be found.

A leading vendor in providing retailer solutions is Anaheim, California-based Where2GetIt. Roughly 280 companies and 550 brands are using Where2GetIt today, representing 700,000 brick-and-mortar locations. These include manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and agencies.

Brands that use Where2GetIt include such mainstays as Office Depot, Hancock Fabrics, Columbia Sportswear, Mountain Hardwear, Patagonia, Monster Cable, Mitsubishi Digital, Sony, ViewSonic, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Applebee’s, White Castle and Cracker Barrel. I ran across the firm looking for an Alpine car stereo, for instance.

The 25-person company got its start in 1997, when it won an assignment from Seiko to build online maps showing where its watches could be bought. Since then, Where2GetIt has extended its “locator” capabilities to a wide range of brand-specific products.

It provides a “turkey locator” for Popeyes Fried Chicken, a “running locator” for Reebok, a “pie locator” for Bakers Square and a “job locator” for recruitment firms. What ties them all together is a focus on helping consumers find brand-name products.

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel says the firm’s “Business Locator” continues to be the firm’s mainstay — typically one of the two most used features on a retail Web site. But the supplemental products have become increasingly important to the firm’s business model, which is based on licensing. For instance, adding coupons to Popeyes’ site doubled the chain’s Web site traffic, he says.

The firm’s other services tendered tend to be more strategic (i.e. future oriented). Firms such as Office Depot, for instance, use Where2GetIt’s mobile products. They include mobile locators, mobile browsers, SMS text messaging and toll-free 800 interactive voice response.

The firm is also heavily engaged in site analytics to drive sales conversion. “We try to figure out how far people will drive” using crowd sourcing and other techniques, says Patel.

On the heels of its $7 million B round last month, 3-D mapping provider Everyscape, announced today that it will expand its coverage to San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. It now covers 15 total cities including its first batch, Boston, New York, Aspen and Miami.

I spent some time this morning talking with a reporter about Everyscape’s growth so far, and what sets it apart. The company most notably covers building interiors, which not only adds a dimension of appeal to users, when compared with Google’s Street View and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3-D, but also advertisers. This has particular applicability to certain categories of local advertisers, such as restaurants and real estate, as well as travel (think hotel room bookings).

The challenge here, as it often is in local, is wrapping your arms around a large and fragmented base of local advertisers. One strategy for Everyscape will be to find single points of entry to larger sources of business, such as hotel chains or third-party travel sites.

One of Everyscape’s features, for example, is the ability to ski down Aspen mountain in the same way that you can drive down the street in other cities it covers (similar to Google’s recent offroading efforts). Though this was likely launched as a novelty, the monetization possibilities come into focus involving ski resorts and travel bookings.

Another important challenge is aggregating traffic. This could be a case in which the feature set is more valuable than the destination — the destination vs. distribution concept that has gained importance in local. Everyscape could do what others in this boat — most recently Krillion — have done to feed its data and functionality to other well-traveled destinations and augment its own traffic.

Given the fragmentation of users and advertisers (especially in local), partnerships to aggregate both will continue to be vital. Everyscape applies well to this formula in that its unique functionality will appeal to both local searchers and certain advertisers, if it can just reach them in larger numbers.

Google announced today that it has expanded its coverage of six cities in Street View, and has added 13 more:

Albuquerque, NM
Anchorage, AK
Austin, TX
Cleveland, OH
Fairbanks, AK
Little Rock, AR
Madison, WI
Nashville, TN
Rockford, IL
Richmond, VA
Spokane, WA
St. Petersburg, FL
Tampa, FL

These cities map well (no pun) to Forbes’ recently released list of top U.S. cities for businesses and careers. Along with this launch, Google has also freed the Street View API for publishers to embed street views directly into their sites or applications. But perhaps coolest of all: Street view now also covers Yosemite National Park.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the Easter holiday talking with friends and family about the economy and how they are dealing with the budget crunch we are all experiencing. One of the common threads of all these conversations has been the need to stay close to home, combine shopping trips and call ahead so you don’t waste time and fuel going to multiple stores. 

More and more people are scaling back vacations and long car rides to try to save money. The next logical question is how people are adapting to this need to stay close to home and make every trip more efficient. Many of my friends and family admitted to using the print and online Yellow Pages more frequently as well as local search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Citysearch because of the mapping features and more detailed information about the stores they were searching for. One friend admitted that if the ad or online profile page content was not specific enough, they moved on, which shows how valuable content is in driving leads. 

Almost everyone I spoke with was calling stores more often to check on availability, price and specific location before they left the house so they had a better plan of where to shop and how best to combine trips. One family member was even reserving merchandise on the phone so they could just pick it up to save even more time. Mapping, it turns out, is becoming a key advantage for online sites as was location specific information and maps in print. 

What does all this mean to Yellow Pages? If the trend is toward more local shopping and the need for directions, local business information and local contact information, then directional media such as Yellow Pages and local search are best suited to address these changing consumer behaviors. These suspicions were confirmed by a more scientific study conducted by Vertis Communications that focused on changing buying habits of grocery shoppers. The study echoes my less than scientific conclusions.

“Economic factors, such as gas prices and the housing market, are changing shoppers’ habits drastically,” says Scott Marden, director of marketing research at the Baltimore-based Vertis. “More than 90% are affected, and many are shopping closer to home, stocking up more and combining shopping trips.” 

Perhaps there is a silver lining for Yellow Pages and other local media in this new economic environment if they can get their reps tuned into this new phenomenon and effectively communicate the opportunity to local business owners.

More and more, people are looking at what Google can’t (or won’t) do. One thing Google isn’t doing is selling a lot of ads on a hyperlocal basis. If you look for a plumber in Tribeca, you are likely to get ads for all of Manhattan. That might simply be an issue of making sure it has enough ads to fill the inventory.

But Google also doesn’t generally get a read on information within a map itself. That’s where LAT49 sees a market. The service, from IDELIX Software, a Vancouver-based company, looks to work with providers of customized maps, leveraging Ajax and Flash, and then sell inventory against it. The company has 20 people, including a five-person sales team for selling travel/tourism, sports and recreation, real estate and local (generally).

In December, the company started working with MapQuest Gas Prices to place advertising along with the regional gas quotes. It also works with various vertical sites, such as mapmyride.com, runningmap.com and oobgolf.com to provide customized maps — and relevant ads — for people seeking a good bike route, jogging path or golf course in Southern California, or wherever they are. The ads also aren’t restricted to specific subjects, typically brands (i.e., Trek bike ads). Instead, they can be for a local bike shop, or a favorite watering hole for bikers.

One of the company’s unique attributes is the ability to place ads on top of maps, rather than having them run alongside as with most sponsored search. Chloe Morrow, vice president of operations, says that with most sites, maps are “too small because they have to make room for the ads” — a lose-lose situation.

The ad placement also frees the advertiser from a specific location. With LAT49, for instance, an REI ad is merely placed near a park, because it has an outdoor context. It doesn’t have to be at REI’s downtown location. Starbucks has similar efforts.

The company also says it benefits from being able to move the ad context as people mouse up the map — north, south, west or east. Many people who are planning a trip might take in huge swaths of geography, but always see the same ads from the origination of the search — something that may have become irrelevant (by the time they get to Phoenix).

Last week, we wrote about The Seattle Times Co. and its new “Network search,” which is powered with FAST. This week, we are covering The Boston Globe’s Boston.com and its new “Federated” search solution, powered by Google.

Federated and Network search are different names for pretty much the same thing. But even as the respective newspapers try to tackle the issues of incorporating small-business advertisers and the elements of local search, they are taking somewhat different approaches.

Boston.com’s mission is to move away from “newspaper.com” toward becoming the aggregator of local community content, notes VP of Product Bob Kempf. The site has taken several concrete steps to get there, including local news outreach, crawls for local events, multimedia search, and perhaps most importantly, business listing search (i.e., Yellow Pages).

The initial step was making the news from The Boston Globe and content from Boston.com searchable. But since then, it has also reached out to 4,500 local Boston-area sites to supplement the content.

The event listings, using ZVents, was something that added a unique element to the site and “quadrupled the amount of listings,” says Kempf. It is more than just effective crawling. Users are seeing that the site has a really good event guide and submitting listings of their own.

Multimedia is another key ingredient for the site and its 360-degree, federated search strategy. As the site has added more and more audio and video, its content has become less findable. But that has been helped by adding search, via Everyzing, a vendor that transcribes audio content to track the content.

The multimedia application “doesn’t bring in huge traffic,” but it is very relevant for a news site, says Kempf. And it goes way beyond the search box. “What we’re doing is adding little ‘searchlets’ into the site, he notes. “We drop [clips of] Manny Ramirez right into articles.”

The business listing effort, on the other hand, suggests the strongest revenue opportunities. Many newspapers are relying on local search vendors such as Planet Discover, Local.com and Harvest Info.

But Kempf’s team reached a conclusion that those solutions would probably always be “second rate” compared with one provided by a major search engine (i.e., Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft). He notes the search engines are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into search algorithms, making relevant matches to queries, ratings and reviews.

Ultimately, Boston.com chose to partner with Google for a variety of considerations, including the power of the Google Maps brand, which appears alongside Boston.com when you go into Business Listings; its relatively low upfront cost (it pays Google just a small amount for the searches that are actually made); access to its extensive tool set; its high level of maintenance; and the ease of using Google’s licensed listings instead of having to make its own deals with a listing company. Google’s broader deal with The New York Times Co. might have had some influence as well.

Boston.com also appreciated the ability to use Google to build out a tiered list of searches that any newspaper would want to have; a “white list” for pure listing lookups; a “gray list” for in between searches, such as place names; and a “black list” for inappropriate searches, such as tying merchandise ads to a news story on a murder in Worchester.

On a business basis, the deal with Google gives Boston.com a chance to make money on reselling the CPM at higher rates and also from local AdSense ads that appear alongside the searches, says Kempf. It also provides new inventory to sell around the search box — not dissimilar to what newspapers have always done, selling mortgage ads around real estate listings and other content.

What Kempf and his team haven’t begun to work on is any search integration with classifieds, an area he admits is the “least sexy.” It also hasn’t begun to aggressively sell to smaller local advertisers — something The Seattle Times appears to be far in front of. “It was very core for GateHouse,” where Kempf worked on Wicked Local in the suburbs that surround Boston, one of the first federated search projects. “But it isn’t core for us.”

In a followup email to me after this post was written, Kempf clarifies:”Classifieds are on the roadmap but not on the immediate roadmap; small business listings very much are core and are on the immediate roadmap.”

Next steps that Kempf envisions include using the search technology to help develop more vertical directories, such has health and business. The site is also getting a massive dose of TV and radio promotion, where Boston.com is not treated as a newspaper, but as an information source.

“The trick is to untrain users for news,” he says. In a followup email to me, also cited above, Kempf adds:  “The news use case remains core and very important to us.  Expanding beyond that use is the challenge.  I wouldn’t want your readers to think that we’ve abandoned news or its importance to us.”

3-D mapping company EveryScape has secured a $7 million B round led by Waltham, Massachusetts-based Dace Ventures. Similar to Google’s Street View, the company stitches together 3-D renderings of street-level cityscapes. Unlike Google or any other mapping provider, however, EveryScape also creates 3-D renderings of some building interiors (see past write-up).

The company hopes this will create a unique user experience and an advertising opportunity within some verticals conducive to checking out a space before visiting (think restaurants and hotels). The same can be said for SMB video advertising, gaining popularity among many SMBs in the restaurant vertical. The challenge for Everyscape will be in selling to SMBs.

Overall, 3-D mapping has potential to add a dimension (literally) to online mapping, to broaden its use cases and ad inventory. Google’s head of Maps and Local, John Hanke, touched on some of these possibilities at ILM:07 in November, and others have been covered in past posts.

Everyscape currently has Boston, Aspen, Miami and New York covered, and funding will enable the time-consuming and costly process of obtaining digital imagery for additional cities. It will also grow its sales force.

TeleAtlas: Plotting the Course

Speaking of obtaining 3-D imagery, over the weekend I got a glimpse at some of the SUVs that mapping data provider TeleAtlas has dispatched to take pictures of roadsides across the country. These images will be used with geometric modeling to create 3-D mockups of roads and cityscapes (similar to what Microsoft has done with Virtual Earth 3-D).

Here is a video (scroll) from The Wall Street Journal that shows what the company is trying to do, and below are a few snapshots I was able to take in San Francisco of one of the vehicles. (Incidentally, check out the quality pics the iPhone is able to take.)

Perry Evans, CEO of Local Matters, took the stage with Neal Polachek today at Local Online Media: London 08, to sift through some of the key issues in the quickly changing local search environment.

Evans, as one of the ground-floor leaders of MapQuest in a former life, took a product innovation focus in looking at where search engines and IYPs need to go to be more effective at attracting users and delivering leads to local advertisers.

Plotting the Course

Mapping, for one, is growing in importance in local search, as it’s inherently tied to local. But Evans contends that mapping should be looked at as less of a core function to single destinations and more of a value-added addition to many. As this happens, sites like MapQuest become less relevant, or commoditized, unless they focus on particular niches or use cases (driving directions, for example).

On mapping, Evans also agreed that Google has seen growth in mapping as a result of increasing screen real estate in Google SERPs devoted to local results (partially related to the larger universal search trend). This was most recently seen by the increase to 10 local results for searches that are determined by Google bots to be local. Essentially, this augments direct navigation traffic to Google Maps with a larger front door through Google-proper searches.

User sophistication is also growing to include geographic modifiers, quotes and other things in search queries. This refines searches and makes it easier for Google to determine local intent — and in turn provide more of these local-heavy SERPs (IP targeting could also be integrated in the future).

Think Social, Act Local

Evans also spent some time on social media, picking up where the previous panel left off (more on that later). The opportunity is clearly there to integrate social (user reviews) with local, though some of the conflicts with existing objectives have made it a bone of contention for many IYPs.

As we’ve pointed out in the past, the SEO benefits are clear to have keyword rich content generated from users throughout business profile pages. This SEO factor becomes more important as Google takes most of its “above the fold” SERP real estate off the table through the blended local results referenced above.

“Consumers are really becoming espoused of local reviews,” Evans said. “It’s a mistake not to grab this content from users and exploit it.”

Universal Appeal

The morphing of search engine result pages was also explored. But beyond the tiring universal search discussion, Evans added another layer to the discussion. The conceptual “third page of search” could be a more meaningful way to branch out into vertically oriented content networks that are more tied in with search results.

“We’re a long way from satisfying consumer need in the ways we should, and in supplying quality leads to advertisers,” he said. “The second page will be there one way or another and the question is, being there one layer down.”

These experiences could also extend lead generation capabilities more meaningfully to the offline world to support the inefficiencies of service industries, Evans posited. This could include integrating tighter communication with dispatched service professionals, for example.

So a plumbing outfit with employees out in the field can supply its service schedule to an ad tool that automatically generates promotions in the neighborhoods where there are existing appointments. On the advertiser end this would involve a twitter-like system to inform dispatched professionals of dynamically scheduled nearby appointments. If scaled up to a certain level, this could equal big savings and operational efficiencies.

“There is currently no advertising media that support this, but it could be a big opportunity,” said Evans.

Getting Agnostic

A more multimedia-focused sales channel has been discussed a great deal today and is a growing topic overall for publishers to capture a bigger piece of shifting online ad dollars. The oft-discussed opportunity exists for publishers to utilize existing relationships with small businesses to be trusted providers of search-based advertising.

This is a particularly notable opportunity for publishers if you look at the paradox of choice facing SMBs, which Evans compared to the early days of ISP competition that bombarded would-be internet users with a dizzying array of subscription options.

“There is so much noise that comes with all of the choices for online and search-based advertising that it becomes disorienting for the small business,” he says. “The friendly known rep, if they come to the table, can trump all of these options.”