iBegin was launched in March and the main aim of the site is to make searching easier by making results more relevant with the help of the community. They ordered up a sponsored review* on this blog and I decided to take them up and present their service to you.
iBegin Source
Local Search going forward will be one of the main drivers of the New Internet Economic Boom {yeah I coined that term}. The major search engines are promoting local listings like never before, you can view maps in Google's SERP's for local landmarks and addresses. In short, Local Search on the internet is going to give the brick and mortar businesses a possible increase in live human traffic. Will it be possible to see new internet millionaires that do not have a website in the future, purely driven by local search?
iBegin Source is the business part of their local business listings which has a TON of data in it already and is available for businesses to download. From the iBegin blog they state that they have had over 2500 downloads, 100 updates, 250 submissions and 15 deletions. They have 10,820,659 total business listings from 50 US states.
There is a free download available for non-commercial use and commercial licenses are $1000 a state or $40,000 for the entire US. This could be a great way for people to build their own little communities for their local state. I did a search for Tamarind Thai Restaurant and it didn't take me more than 15 seconds.
You can also look at a bigger Map and Directions, if you are registered you can edit the listing. You can also submit a listing, which is free - registration required.
All the listings conform to a wide variety of web usability and accessibility standards.
Can iBegin make the world a more searched place?
Their main sites services are centered around the community and gives them a lot of control for adding listings from their own neighborhood onto the site. For once it's not a beta, but they are only limited to a few cities at the moment and when I mean few I mean Ottawa and Toronto in Canada, Kalamazoo and Nashville in USA.
To sum it up, I quote:
iBegin is a local site that helps you find restaurants, hotels, and more. It's beauty lies in the fact that it is user driven - users can add listings (for example, a favorite cafe near their house), and can then tag other places. The beauty of that (yes, another separate levels of beauty) is that by tagging, the search feature becomes more and more useful. Throw in reviews, pictures, and favorites, and a winning solution is had for everyone. A local search done right.
You can browse around the supported cities and see what other people have added. Looking for the Bamboo House restaurant in Kalamazoo? From the screenshot you can see that you can submit reviews, add to favorites, tag, add pictures or even update the listing. This part of the site seems to be monetized by Google Adsense, the de facto Web 2.0 startup monetizer.
An interesting way to also make money here would be to sell a spot on the listing for the owner of the establishment where they can constantly add specials or offers. Kinda like a "claim this listing" function.
But...
With the ability to not add data to more than the 4 cities in the user generated area, listed above, iBegin might be shooting itself in the leg. It is a great way to test the site and all but if you feel confident enough of the system to not put the customary beta tag then why not open up to other cities?
Maybe it's a safety measure to play down the amount of spam they will undoubtedly get. Overall though a good way to make the Local Search market sit up and take notice.
iBegin is a venture of Ahmed Farooq and from his blog I gathered that they plan on expanding the iBegin Source soon.
We are only in the US right now, but in the upcoming months we are expanding worldwide, including to countries like Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and more.
*You can order a sponsored review here.
Technorati Tags: local search, ibegin, web 2.0
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It is a bit more complicated than it looks
The reason we are only in four cities is due to manpower – each city has a hired editor in charge of the city. We are taking a slow and methodical expansion approach to each city.
That’s cool that every city has their own editor.
Do the editors have to be from the city though to be able to do their job?
Yep – have to be locals
iBegin Source is run separately – the data from that site will allow us to push for quicker expansion (other data providers have some hard terms and are very intrusive).
It’ll be interesting to see how the “one small city at a time” approach works out.
Over at YellowBot we’re going the opposite way, starting with the whole country.
To us it seems like a better approach.
Also: How will _reselling_ crawled(?) data work legally? (If they are crawling…) I know Google got sued by one of the data providers (and came to an agreement) for crawling and just showing that kind of data.
– ask
You seem to be following me Ask
The data is not crawled. It is bought from various data sources.
Hi Ahmed,
Haha – no, one of my colleagues have a google alert on “local search” or something like that.
Btw, I noticed that on source.ibegin.com you have a search for the whole country now – neat (although it was crazy slow for the tests I did).
It’s interesting that you got a deal buying the data that’ll let you resell it relatively cheaply as you do. Cool! Are you planning to add “richer” data or will you stick to just name, addresses, phone numbers and a basic category?
– ask
Guys! Guys! There is plenty of space for everybody on the internet.
Ali:
Indeed!
Actually, it’s really interesting how many local search sites there are and the many many subtle differences we have.
– ask
http://www.MobileLocalSearch.net is an informative website featuring mobile search articles, news, reports, mailing newsletter, and blogs. Please visit the site for more info on mobile local search.
Yeah it is slow – we were more concentrated on the data, will be fixing that in the upcoming weeks.
As for the data: it isn’t cheap. We didn’t just buy data – we’ve bought over a dozen databases with full redistribution permissions. It is a big investment
We have a lot of extraneous data that we do not plan on sharing right now.
AhmedF,
Like what kind of extraneous data are we talking?
Not an easy answer to define.
Some xamples:
From CMRs we get direct data regarding a franchise. Starbucks – 24 hours, drive-through, etc
From credit companies we get company credit ratings, estimated floor space, estimated revenue, # of employees, etc
From restaurant databases we get links to menus, multiple categories, payment forms, etc.
The challenge is presenting this data in a way that scales to all businesses. We are working on adding extraneous data to the public system (and thus purchased data).