Yipit Blog

Each product you shop for raises a different set of questions, and we want to be able to answer them for every category. That’s why we’re building New York local search one category at a time.

Image by S. Jones

The first one is Home Furniture. Here’s how we picked it:

Challenge. We wanted to start with a really difficult category, one wrought with opaque, disorganized, mostly offline information. Turns out there are a lot of them, though furniture is definitely a good example. Search “Furniture” on Google or Yahoo, and you’ll receive mediocre results. Search for the actual type of furniture you’re interested in, and you will be very disappointed.

Granularity. We aim to go way deeper than any other local search site, and satisfy diverse preferences of style, price and materials. In other words, if you’re looking for a mailbox all you need to know is location, but deciding which furniture store to visit requires more granularity. For example, you might want to know who carries low-priced modern leather sofas.

Volume. Which vertical has the most searches? Analyzing search volume via Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and Overture (RIP) provided a list of highly searched categories in New York, such as restaurants, salons, florists, hardware and furniture stores.

Number of Stores. We wanted to release our product right away, so we can start collecting feedback as soon as possible. There are a relatively limited number of furniture stores (currently we track around 350 consumer facing showrooms specializing in Home Furniture and Lighting).

Adjacencies. We’re planning on quickly expanding to other categories. If we start to nail Home Furniture, we’ll widen our net to Office Furniture, Appliances and Electronics.

So that’s how we chose our initial category. Since then, we’ve gone crazy trying to deliver the perfect local search results for Manhattan furniture. Hopefully our results will demonstrate the power of “deep local search.”

Update. So how did we do? Decide for yourself: here are Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.

Tags: furniture, Yipit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under Yipit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.