We just added mattresses to Yipit. Now you can search every showroom for mattresses in new york, refine by price, brands and materials, and find the nearest showrooms with the widest selections.

Read all about our results in Furnication, our furniture blog.

On Wednesday we announced our business profile pages and elicited feedback on Yipit. Well, we got it in the form of an awesome UI & SEO review from techsoapbox. Depending on your math, there were just shy of 30 discrete suggestions.

The problem with local search is a data problem. For local shopping, Yipit’s focus is on inventory information in local businesses (currently furniture in new york). Also critical is enhanced context in location. For the last hundred years, the leading local search solution (the yellow pages) provided a list of business contact info, organized by city. 

However, high-value local recommendations often require granular local context (e.g., “two blocks south of Penn Station,” “in Columbus Circle,” etc.). Whether you’re in New York or anywhere else, consumers often seek more than a street address.

Our friend Ahmed Farooq of iBegin has developed iBegin Places, an open solution for enhanced location information, including neighborhoods, public transporation and landmarks. 

This is a valuable resource for the local search community, and it’s optimized for our usability (and cross-platform compatibility):

all places (and subsequent ‘collections’ of ‘places’) are easily exportable via GeoRSS, Google Maps JS, JSON, and/or KML.

Similar data is being developed by several excellent by firms. iBegin Places, however, is free to use and open to contribute. We’re excited to see the local search community take advantage of this resource, and most importantly, continue to add valuable location context.

Since our prototype has been out for a few weeks now, we thought it was time for an update.

Traffic
So far we’ve had thousands of users and tens of thousands of local searches. We’re excited to see what happens as we start expanding to more categories.

Furniture Store Partners
We started to set up a few partnerships with some top-tier showrooms. Now, you’ll receive If you 5% off if you mention Yipit at any of them:

• Sit Down New York (great place for discount modern furniture)
• New York Lighting (one of the best lighting stores in the city)
• Manhattan Cabinetry (experts on murphy beds and cabinets)
• International Furniture (one of the largest discount showrooms in the city)

Features
We’ve been thinking of all the ways our repository of store inventories can be useful to people. Here are a few we’ve implemented:

• Tweetscout - twitter account that announces sales in NYC showrooms. You can also send a furniture query to @tweetscout, and you’ll get an answer right away
• Furnication - a new Manhattan furniture blog, based inventory data of every showroom and what we’ve learned. For example, find the cheapest futon in Manhattan, the thrift store that picks up the quickest, or even the easiest way to shop at IKEA.
• A bigger idea we’ll tell you about soon

A big thanks to everyone so far. We’ll keep you posted on more.

Here are the highlights:

• Search every NYC home furniture store for couches, beds, dining tables, bookshelves and 56 other home furniture and lighting products
• Specify the price range (from cheap to luxury), the style of furniture (modern, traditional), the material (leather, rattan, fabric), the condition (used, new) and more
• We’ve included the website of almost every store, as well as links to coverage in NY Times, NY Magazine and Apartment Therapy, and links to Yelp, NY Magazine and CitySearch profiles
• Find stores near an address, zip code or over 60 Manhattan neighborhoods including Upper East Side, Chelsea, Lower East Side

We’re 100% focused on adding more and more product and service categories, as well as new ways to interact with that data. In fact, we will never stop adding categories and features. We have a list of literally hundreds of possible features, but we wanted to let everyone start using Yipit as soon as possible. That way we can incorporate your experiences and feedback and become more and more useful. You can track our progress through the Yipit Blog or by following our twitter account.

Thanks again to everyone who gave us early feedback on Yipit. Please continue to let us know what you would like to see (from features to categories). We’re very excited about Yipit and hope we will be able to help you find the right stores selling the products you want.

Update: Just added mattresses in New York. Now you can search every showroom for the type, brand and pricing you want. 

Well, there are two proposals: 1) local user reviews / content and 2) more accurate business data. Clearly, both will be necessary but many new local search companies seem to putting their chips behind proposal #1. We at Yipit are focusing on proposal #2. Who’s right? That will hopefully be debated at a panel Yipit proposed for SXSW’s interactive festival. I say hopefully because the panels are determined, in part, by a vote. So, if you care to support Yipit and the local search industry, please submit your vote for our panel: The Local Search Solution - Context or Accuracy? I’m not going to say that this is more important that voting for the national election, but I’m also not going to say that.

As for the panel speakers, we are pleased to announce the following highly-respected members of the local search community have agreed to participate on the panel we suggested:

• Sebastian Provencher, Praized, author of the Praized Blog
• Perry Evans, CEO of Local Matters, co-founder of MapQuest
• Peter Krasilovsky, The Kelsey Group, author of Local Onliner

In addition to our panel, I would encourage everyone to also vote for another excellent panel proposal from Chris Tolles of Topix.com:

• Think Globally, Post Locally: The Emerging Power of Local Voice

Image by Jorge Gobbi

In a city of skyscrapers, single addresses often host hundreds of businesses. Making matters worse is a predominance of mail forwarding centers that provide an authentic-looking mailing addresses for only a few bucks a month. In New York City, address redundancies are not the exception, they are the rule.

There are several scenarios for why businesses might share an address, including:

1. Legitimate businesses sharing a single office building.

2. Legitimate service providers (e.g., contractors, transportation, etc.) who obtain a Manhattan forwarding address to improve their local SEO. For examples, look up Yipit’s address on Google Maps and see our thousands of “neighbors.”

3. Businesses with an actual local retail presence that use multiple names and web presences. See #1 and #3 in a search for modern furniture.

4. Businesses with no local retail presence appearing local by using a forwarding or otherwise fabricated address.

But shouldn’t checking for multiple businesses solve all of these scenarios, and weed out the good from the bad? Not in Manhattan, where the vast majority of businesses share a building. But shouldn’t suite, floor or office numbers correct for this? Perhaps, but they’re rarely available. Analyzing a sample of Manhattan yellow page data reveals the following:

• % of businesses located at an address occupied by at least one other business: 83.2%
• % of those businesses whose address includes a suite, floor or office number: 31.7%
• n = 7,425

In less dense areas, automatically eliminating address redundancies can go a long way. In Manhattan, multiple businesses that share the same address cannot be eliminated prima facie, so you need a local authority to determine the correct answer.

We analyzed the field of leading local search options including: Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Ask City / Citysearch, YellowPages.com and Yelp. We performed two searches, “furniture ny,ny” and “couches ny,ny” and looked at the top ten results. We excluded YellowPages.com from the survey because the results, ignoring the advertisements, were just listed in alphabetical order with no attempt at classifying based on quality.

The following tables summarizes our results. For each search engine’s top ten results, the first column of numbers represent the percentage of stores that sell any furniture and the second column indicates the percentage of stores that carry a wide selection.

Top 10 Results for “furniture ny,ny”:

Top 10 Results for “couches ny,ny”:

Here are some selected observations regarding the quality of the results returned by search engine.

Google Maps. Of the big three, Google Maps did the best with the furniture search returning eight out of ten actual furniture stores (though one of the results had an old address). The other two results were “A Salt and Battery” (their #3 result and an excellent fish and chips restaurant) and a furniture store that closed six months ago. However, only two of the eight furniture stores offer a wide selection of furniture pieces. Unfortunately, when it came to the couches search, Google broke down; they returned mostly hotels and one web design shop but no furniture stores.

Yahoo Local. We were most disappointed by Yahoo Local’s results. For a major, yellow pages defined category like furniture, just 2 actual furniture stores were returned, neither of which were major furniture stores. Also, their #4 and #7 results were the same business. As for couches, they returned four actual furniture stores but none had a sizable selection of couches.

Ask City / Citysearch. When Ask combined with Citysearch to provide a new local search engine, we thought they would be a strong competitor in the market. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have pulled it off. Ask City returned only five actual furniture stores (they also returned two stores that have been closed for months). Of those five furniture stores, only one was a major furniture store. When it came to the couches search, where we thought they could have an advantage with Citysearch’s database, they were unable to return any actual furniture stores.

Yelp. Yelp surprised us the most. They successfully returned ten furniture stores. While only four of those were major retailers, the stores they returned seemed to be driven by quantity and quality of user reviews. However, they do not seem to be able to handle more specific searches. Searching for couches returned only one actual furniture store with the remaining results being bars / lounges.

Conclusion. We were surprised by the low quality of the local search results we received. For a general category like furniture, we expected much better results (20% high quality results is disappointing). When it comes to going beyond one of the broad categories and searching more specifically (e.g., “couches”), it is clear that search engines do not have an answer. When product-type data is not readily available online, search engines will try to use whatever other context they have around the business (web page results, user reviews) to try to find relevant results. But, ultimately, that leads to highly inaccurate listings. We continue to believe that accuracy is one of the major components of building a successful local search engine and do not think current local search data / algorithms can provide it.

See Yipit results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.

Here’s an update on what we have been doing with our first major category: home furniture.

Terry Tate Office Linebacker

Step 1. Learn how to shop for furniture

To ascertain the key questions and decision factors facing NYC furniture shoppers, we looked at the following:

Industry Experts. We consumed every NYC design and shopping journal we could get our hands on, including: Apartment Therapy New York, New York Magazine, Daily Candy New York, Daily Dose, Design*Sponge, Dwell Blog, NYT Home & Garden, and many more.

Taxonomy. To formulate a universe of products, we scoured major furniture websites, like Ikea, Rooms To Go and Furniture.com, as well as the websites of local showrooms. We learned how stores organize their inventory and (hopefully) how shoppers expect that inventory to be organized.

Interviews. We solicited as much feedback as possible from store owners, interior designers, and friends.

Step 2. Find every furniture store

Next we compiled a list of every business that could possibly sell furniture. We:

1. Acquired detailed business listings data from provider Localeze. We looked at a lot of vendors, but were particularly impressed by Localeze’s proprietary listings compilation process (see this case study PDF for more info).
2. From the Localeze database, we included all businesses that: (i) were in a furniture related category or (ii) had furniture or a related term in the name.
3. Looked up websites of major retail chains and added Manhattan locations not already on our list.
   
4. Added any showrooms mentioned in the NYC design and shopping media that we did not already have.
   

Eventually, we narrowed our list down to approximately 2,000 furniture stores.

Step 3. Understand every store

Finally we needed to learn as much as possible about every store. Here’s how we did it:

Went Door to Door. Seriously. Some had closed, some didn’t sell furniture, and some were awesome. For every furniture store, we documented what each store sold and what made them special. We collected over 400 points of data at each location. We also spoke to as many people as we could – the owners, the clerks and the customers.

Went Webpage to Webpage. We also reviewed the stores’ websites, news media / blog references and online profiles on sites like Yelp, Citysearch and New York Magazine. We’ve organized all this research and will display it on each store’s Yipit profile.

Step 4: To be decided

We want to be ridiculously thorough. That’s why we’re releasing Yipit as early as possible, so we can gather feedback on how to maximize the information on each business and continue to improve our results.

Coming up with the methodology above was a challenge for us: lots of research, mistakes and hard work. But, now that we have the experience under out belt, we will be able to aggressively expand into other categories. We also recognize that it’s not in any way perfect. So, if you have any ideas at all on how we can improve it / sources to check, please email us or leave a comment.

Update: Check out Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.