Online/Interactive

The Kelsey Group has been using AdWords to promote our Global Yellow Pages Report -- a massive piece of work on the industry from my colleagues Charles Laughlin and Bobbi Luster -- and our ad uses the phrase "Yellow Pages."…

There are a bunch of people out there who believe The Kelsey Group overhypes local. And that's certainly the lens through which we view the world. But if you pay attention, we clearly have a balanced view of the local…

Now Intuit has gotten into the local search game, creating an InsiderPages/Judy's Book-like directory site. The site Zipingo has been live since August, but generally under the radar. Intuit is trying to leverage its huge QuickBooks' SME user base to…

For anyone who can't keep up with the dizzying torrent of service announcements from Google (or anyone wondering what $400+ a share gets you), CNET News provides a nice chart that summarizes its many products and (public) initiatives under way.Meanwhile,…

Shawn Riegsecker, Centro CEO, took me aside today at our conference and helped clarify for me that Centro is not a network but rather a buying service for national advertisers that want to make local/geotargeted online ad buys. Centro will…

Everyone has been speculating about whether Google Base is Google's entry into online classifieds. I have argued that it's about much more than classifieds. But I can tell you with confidence that MSN is soon to enter the online classifieds…

Local search is getting a lot better, but one of the things that most engines and sites cannot now do with accuracy is deliver results consistent with the way people actually search. For example, I live in an area of…

This approach has some risks, but it is clearly a way for the sales force to gain advertising in a world where the consumer is way ahead of the SMB in adapting the concept of local search. Obviously the name…

While Craig Newmark would undoubtedly bristle at that characterization, the network of sites that bears his name is the undisputed king of online classifieds (not counting eBay). According to a report put out by Pew, using comScore data, traffic to…

Here's another movement in the transformation of TV (from reach to targeting) ... per the WSJ, TiVo is working with Comcast and others to enable users to "search" for ads that are more relevant to them: TiVo users will be…

comScore reported that, while Internet use grew 7 percent overall in 2004, online map site traffic increased 33 percent to 51.3 million. Mapquest held a 71 percent share of the market in September, according to comScore, while Yahoo! Maps followed…

Ingenio and Marchex, which is building out a proprietary network of local and vertical destination sites, announced that Ingenio PPCall advertisers would appear on Marchex's network of sites. Marchex subsidiary TrafficLeader is a "simplified search" vendor to YellowPages.com (SBC, BellSouth)…

A new company called Centro launched today that purports to be a one-stop shop for national advertisers to buy ad space on local Web sites such as newspaper sites. It appears to be a local ad placement service for national…

Suddenly everyone wants to offer offline retail information: Google, CNET and now Interchange Corp.'s Local.com. Interchange is providing ShopLocal€™s newspaper circular/FSI data to consumers through Local.com. Local.com is fast and clean, but thin. Interchange recognizes the need to fill out…

My colleague Michael Boland blogged about Integrent's new geo-targeted network Centro, below. When I spoke, now some time ago, to Integrent CEO Shawn Riegsecker (who's on a newspaper panel at ILM:05) he told me he wanted to build a newspaper-based…

Dex Media issued a press release today announcing it has achieved a comfortable lead as the most-used IYP/local search site within Dex's 14-state home region, with a 32 percent share of directional media searches for the period, according to comScore.…

Matching Yahoo!'s testing of PPCall, Google is testing "Click to Call." No phone numbers are exposed; the service connects advertisers and would-be buyers by clicking an icon. I was unable to find any of the ads live on Google, but…

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that RH Donnelley is in talks to acquire Dex Media, an acquisition that would propel RHD into the third position in the US directories market, behind SBC and Verizon, ahead of BellSouth and…

Editor and Publisher reported that more than 1,900 jobs have been cut from major and mid-sized newspapers over the past year. The cuts have included 500 jobs at The New York Times, 16 percent of Knight Ridder's San Jose Mercury…

In addition to the data jointly put out by Pew and comScore about the rise of search are data on local search and IYP usage. According to comScore, Yahoo! Local was not far behind AOL in terms of the number…