Real-Time Search, Part II: Local

In the previous post, I promised to address the local angle of yesterday’s blitz of search engine/social media deals. Many of the concepts apply to local: We’ve looked at a few examples in the past such as the efforts of Praized Media to marry local search with Twitter-like feeds.

I recently spoke with Praized cofounder Sebastien Provencher about the first application — a joint venture with YPG Canada called Calgary.com. It essentially blends traditional local search (listings) with the new paradigm of the “statusphere.” In other words, what people are saying about local businesses right now.

Calgary.com search results blend the two, putting tweets — fed directly from Twitter and filtered by keyword — on top of traditional IYP listings. Going forward the two could be integrated in other ways, and targeted in ways other than keywords.

Seb and YPG’s Darby Sieben agree that this is a model for the next “version” of local search. More immediately, Darby sees it as a test bed for similar functionality that could be integrated across YPG’s properties, such as YellowPages.ca.

Now that Google and Bing have integrated real-time feeds with search, it could catch on in local even faster. This could happen on both Google (how will it be integrated with the 7 pack?) as well as IYP domains.

And the fusion of local and real-time feeds will come in many flavors — not just blended search results. Twitter’s new geolocation capability has many possibilities, many of them wildly speculated in this past post.