| Over 30 directories are now fighting to the death for the ‘holy grail’ of search in this country, the last and reputed largest of the so-called verticals, local search.
It is pitting a struggling Yellow Pages against aggressive newcomers such as Rupert Murdoch’s well-funded True Local and a growing number of lesser-known start-ups operating from both within Australia and from overseas.
What’s more, the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new tool BING are also starting to make serious inroads into the internet’s most rapidly growing and potentially most lucrative market space.
Not content with imposing those intrusive and not very useful maps on top of the ‘real’ search results, Google are now going for the king hit and have let it be known to the general public (through official briefings to Aussie journalists) that the best way to search for a local business is to use the area keyword first and the product or service keyword second, e.g. ‘Parramatta Plumber’ not ‘Plumber Parramatta’.
Of course they are technically correct since it is well-known within the industry that using the product or service keyword first biases the result towards the larger players. However, they had never bothered to widely publicise this important search tip until it suddenly suited their plans to dominate local search here in Australia (Google Maps, part of Google Local, is based in Sydney).
Consider this: if you are in downtown Parramatta and have rapidly rising water lapping around your ankles do you really want major national directories or a list of the biggest plumbers in Sydney dominating the first three pages of Google, or would you much prefer a truly local directory with a comprehensive list of all the smaller 24/7 emergency services – which now usually appear on Page 5 at the earliest?
Frankly, you have to ask yourself why Google did not share this fact before?
And, while this may not sound a big deal to the average web user, what this seemingly subtle change in search behaviour does is effectively cruel most (but not all of the major directories, or YOC’s SMARTPAGES), who have built their content management systems around this latter (traditional paper based) approach to local online search.
Most critically for the industry-based directories (called verticals in the trade) if the change does become widespread as expected, and Google is famous for its ability to ‘educate’ its adoring army of users, they will quickly start to lose their top billing on the important Top 10 listings on Google’s first page – which in turn will inevitably lead to loss of advertisers and subscriber revenue and in many cases major sustainability issues.
At the end of the day it is the quality of search results which should dictate how or where a web search query is undertaken (read who will ultimately succeed in this space) and Google has just made that a whole lot harder for most of its would-be competitors! | 
