How Local Search will change how we use the Internet

Most studies show that a vast majority (something like 60%+) of all searches have what is called "local intent".  This means that sometimes the searcher adds a local geographical indicator (e.g. "seo company portsmouth").  But sometimes they search with local intent without being specific about geography – e.g. it is likely that a search for "dentist" has local intent even without being specific about location.

The problem however is that the information that forms the foundation for local content searches is spread across a number of unrelated sources such as yellow pages, newspapers, local review sites, local directories and of course, search engines.  Additionally, the information in a lot of these sources is either incomplete or out of date and information relating to smaller towns and villages may not exist at all.

Major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo are aware of these issues and are investing engineering resources to help solve them.

The real change will happen in the way that people will consume local information in the near future.  As the search engines get better about identifying local searches and the results become more relevant and more complete, local search will reach beyond the quest for a local pizza restaurant or hotel.  Local information such as road works, crime rates, weather patterns, events and concerts, council meetings, etc will be blended in a similar way that Google’s universal search has combined different types of searches (video, photos, etc) into a single set of results.

This will mean that the search engines will start to become portals for the local community that will get them entrenched into daily life even more than they are today.  In 2007, local search grew by 24 percent compared with only a 14 percent rise in general web search (comScore Networks study).

Another massive change will be based around mobile services.  There is a lot o

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