Local Search to Grow from $3B to $13B by 2010

The Kelsey Group recently released a new forecast for the global online search market, which includes Internet Yellow Pages, local search and wireless. Based on their research they project the market to increase from the $3.4 billion it brought in last year to nearly $13 billion by 2010. Additionally The Kelsey Group projects a 30.5 percent growth rate over the next four years for the global online search market.

Yellow Pages revenues are forecast to increase by only 1.5 percent to reach $28.4 billion over the same time period. The Kelsey Group does not believe that IYP's will take the market share away from traditional Yellow Pages advertising, but possibly from sources such as classified ads.

Read the full article: http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3585511

Housingmaps.com combines Google's maps and Craiglist's real estate listings

Housingmaps.com is a nifty little website that takes the real estate listings in Craigslist, and overlays them as clickable points on the area related Google map. Housingmaps makes sorting through the apartment or real estate section of craigslist much more efficient, especially if you are looking for an apartment in a specific area. Additionally, Housingmaps displays the price, address, photos, and contact information of a listing from Craigslist while showing the user the exact position on the respective area map.

Hackers have also meshed Google Maps with sites like the photo-sharing service Flickr, Yahoo's traffic notifications, city transit maps and others. This merging of powerful data and programs to create useful daily online programs is a trend that is likely to increase in popularity. At some point I fully expect the larger companies to start merging their services legitimately, but until then there are useful simple sites like Housingmaps.com.
Check out the full article here: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,67514-0.html

A couple important local search statistics

A hot search marketing topic of late seems to focus around local search. Here are some local search statistics... If you are interested in learning more about local search visit us on the web at www.gdmi.net.

Quick Stats
- There are approximately 300 million searches per day for information on the Internet (Nielsen/NetRatings 2005)

- 60% of activity online is one way or another “related to local content” (Google 5/03)- For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, "E-Commerce Gets Smarter“)

- 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, and of those consumers 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline” (NPD Group)

Internet users are looking for “Local" businesses”
- 117 million Internet users accounted for over 3.7 billion searches conducted on the Internet in the month of August 2004 (comscore qsearch, 01/2004-4/2004)

- 25% of ALL commercial Internet searches are conducted by users looking for local merchants (Kelsey-Bizrate 2004)- 35% of ALL searches are “local” (DM News)

Note: That means that there are over 300 million local merchant searches per month (Q1 2004)