A little know website by the Yellow Pages Association, yellowpagesoptout.com, offers consumers a place to find their local yellow page providers and instructions on how to opt out from receiving yellow page publications.
With the universal accessibility of the internet, the growing number of local searches, it is surprising to me how much business owners pay to be in yellow pages. We highlighted earlier in the year the declining empire that was the yellow pages, and continue help business owners save money by advertising through new mediums. The majority of Americans are connected to the internet every second of the day, either at home, on their cell phone, or even through their GPS system in their cars. On the go, finding a business online has never been so simple, and so immediate.
By Jorge Cordova · October 18 2010
yellow pages
Just a year ago Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website that uses collective buying power to offer steep discounts to its local subscribers, was in only 20 cities and expressed their hopes “to reach 1 million email subscribers in the very near future.” Today, Groupon is in 88 U.S. cities, has over 13 million subscribers and is valued at more than 1 billion dollars. Is your head spinning? Well, it should be, as Forbes magazine dubbed Groupon “the fastest growing company ever.”
It might also interest you to know that, 11 months ago, Groupon was recognized at the 2009 Chicago Innovation Awards as one of the ten most innovative companies base...
By Jorge Cordova · October 04 2010
groupon, ezlocal, chicago innovation awards
Google announced this week that they are rolling out stars in local search. You may already be familiar with the concept from normal Google search results, and today's popular browsers. You can customize future searches by bookmarking, or starring, the exact result you are looking for. If you are like me, you will find it very handy for repeat searches for the same business.
As you can see, each business listing is armed with stars. Now if you frequent a restaurant that you visit often, and you want quick access to in the future, you can now star this feature. To make it even more handy, its accessible via Google Mobile, in fact its the first option you see under local:
By Jorge Cordova · September 21 2010
google places, local business search
Yesterday, we here at EZlocal stumbled upon Sporcle, a trivia quiz website on which users have a set time limit to name all of the items within a given subject. After bumbling through a few quizzes on history and geography, we searched for a quiz on a topic we truly excel at: Local Search. Much to our chagrin, no such quiz existed. So we made one.
We organized 40 of the top local search players by U.S. Traffic Rank and Worldwide Alexa Rank. How many of the top local search engines and directories can you name? Go to Sporcle and take the local search quiz now!
When you finish the quiz tweet your score
By Jorge Cordova · August 26 2010
local search quiz, sporcle
Today I saw a post from a friend on Facebook touting a new feature. Their wall post read:
“Hey check this new facebook feature out, i got my own mobile number. go to www.fb-mobile.com to get it.”
Forty minutes later I found out their account had been hacked.
A quick whois on the above domain shows the url (www.fb-mobile.com) is registered to JIANGSU BANGNING SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY CO. LTD and it was registered j...
By Dave Cosper · August 11 2010
facebook, phishing scam, mobile phones
According to the June comScore report, Google presented over 10 billion search results in the US last month alone. Of those, over 2 billion were local searches - consumers looking for products and services in their area -- to buy offline.
As the number of local-based searches continues to grow on Google and Yahoo, EZlocal.com’s clients are positioned to reap the growing benefits of targeting potential customers in their area. The local search space continues to offer new opportunities to small business owners who want to get a leg up on the competition. With somewhere around only 15% of existing business listings even being claimed online it’s winner takes all. It’s early bird takes the worm in local search, so businesses looking to secure top search engine placement need to act quickly.
General contractors, plumbers, roofers, insurance agents, attorneys, dentists and jewelers are just a few of the small business owners who have b...
By Dave Cosper · August 11 2010
google places, free business listing
Yahoo! and Bing seem to be sharing organic search algorithm.
The Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance has been making huge strides over the past week. Last week, Yahoo! announced that they are now testing Microsoft Bing's data. Today, however, we are seeing real evidence for the first time.
As an up and coming search site, we at EZlocal like to monitor our search result success regularly. We thrive off of organic search traffic and want to do everything we can to improve that traffic. We have been well aware of how poorly our site performs in Bing and have been on top of watching our search rankings. Today, all of the sudden, we noticed some major ranking changes in Bing. In fact, we couldn't help but notice that they seemed amazingly familiar to our Yah...
By Jim Tracy · July 28 2010
bing, yahoo, search alliance
Google employees have been answering some user questions and ideas via YouTube. They cover topics from duplicates to spam, check out the YouTube playlist or see some of the "best of" embedded below.
Our favorite takeaways are how to report duplicate listings (don't delete the listing complete or all instances may get deleted!), using Areas Served to hide your address, and "please do not rank business for wikipedia entry."
Duplicate Listings
How do I merge and/or report duplicate listings?
By Jorge Cordova · July 27 2010
google places
