Yipit Blog

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.

Based on our review of the Manhattan furniture market, we found local search engines’ current furniture local search results largely disappointing. Depending on the service we used, searches for “furniture ny,ny” returned many actual furniture stores, though few major retailers. Searching for “couches ny,ny” returned only bars, restaurants, hotels and no furniture stores. When a user goes beyond the broad furniture category and searches for a product type (like “couches”), search engines break down completely.

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.

When we tackle a new category, we don’t just grab a shirttail or push it out of bounds. We Terry Tate Office Linebacker it.

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.

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.