Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude.
Examples of local searches include "Hong Kong hotels", "Manhattan restaurants", and "Dublin car rental".
Local search is the natural evolution of traditional offline advertising, typically distributed by newspaper publishers and TV and radio broadcasters, to the Web.
With the advent of the Web, consumers are increasingly using search engines to find these local products and services online.
[4] As a natural consequence of this shift in consumer behavior, local product, and service providers are slowly shifting their advertising investments from traditional off-line media to local search engines.
Recovery search implies, for example, that a consumer knows who she is looking for (i.e., Main Street Pizza Parlor) but she does not know where they are, or needs their phone number.
Discovery search implies that the searcher knows, for example, what she wants but not who she needs it from (i.e., pizza on Main Street in Springfield).
Although the study can’t replicate Google’s algorithm, it did deliver several interesting findings: On December 2021's Vicinity Update[citation needed], Google announced on Twitter announced that it had updated its local search algorithm which "involved a rebalancing of various factors we consider in generating local search results.
In either case, local media companies base their solution on business listing databases developed in-house or licensed from a third-party data publisher.
More recently, social media sites Facebook, Foursquare, LocalMate and Zappenin have become more directly involved in local search by updating their mobile apps with features to help people discover new businesses to visit.
Many mobile web portals require the subscriber to download a small Java application, however, the recently added .mobi top-level domain has given impetus to the development of mobile-targeted search sites are based upon a standard mobile-specific XML protocol that all modern mobile browsers understand.
The advantage of mobile responsive website development is that no software needs to be downloaded and installed, plus these sites may be designed to simultaneously provide conventional content to traditional PC users using automatic browser detection.
Google has a posted policy that states all reviews "should accurately represent the location in question.