google cornering local search?

is google cornering the local search market? perhaps it’s a bit too alarmist to suggest such a thing when local search as a market is still in such infancy globally. now while the world may be getting better at building and indexing structured local content, even in highly unstructured information markets (like what askme and burrp have done/are doing for india), meaningful, scalable monetization still eludes us all – another blog post altogether. let’s get back on track here. google recently launched an extension of sorts to their local search product called google places. tc describes google places best, as “a local search page for restaurants and other local businesses that brings together the address, phone number, website, maps, description, directions, photos and reviews all on one page.” sounds very much like a local business details page you might be used to finding on burrp!, or yelp, or citysearch. in fact, as you can see, it looks like one too. to be fair to google, once on a places page, almost all of the information is aggregated external links: reviews and pictures from yelp, menus from menupages, etc. even so, there are three major issues, or general shifts that i notice when i see something like this. indulge me:

1. organic search results – google set out to be an information gateway to the world wide web, quickly redirecting people to the source of information as quickly as it could. this new product calls that philosophy into question. as googlers will soon start to notice for local search queries performed on the google search engine, google places pages will begin to show up, undoubtedly in the treasured ‘first ten.’ this means that google itself will possibly claim more real estate on the search results page than other players, i.e. one box results + google places pages. it’s funny – google usually penalizes seo tricksters for trying to play the search saturation game. they seem to be dabbling in a bit of it themselves now.

2. owning the traffic – google has long had a monopoly over where and how to direct the world of internet traffic. now, it wants to hold onto it a little longer before it lets go. i generally do not have a problem with this; google is an independent company, and it is free to figure out how to monetize local search like the rest of us; but it’s interesting to see this slight shift in google’s behaviour. take a look at any google places page – wouldn’t you say that just glancing at that page is giving you about 90% of the information you need to help you make some kind of a decision on any local business? while google may be fairly linking to all the right sources, by creating this page, they have almost eliminated the need to click through at all! yikes!
more interestingly, a page like this threatens to undermine  experimental local search revenue models that exist today, all of which are primarily lead-based models (yext and yelp have the proprietary phone numbers; angieslist and redbeacon basically connect service seekers with service providers). if all pertinent information is available on a google places page, a user may be disinclined to use other local search platforms (unless of course it can help them save considerable money).

3. ads, ads, ads – not much to say here, but notice those google ads on the lower right hand corner? that’s right – yet another google-owned page that it will effectively monetize by serving relevant ads, arguably on the back of multiple content providers. fair? you decide…