Thursday, January 27, 2005

Local search from A9 and Amazon.com

It's being widely reported that A9 announced their version of a Yellow Pages local search.

Most of the coverage is focusing on A9's "20 million images of businesses and their local surroundings" that gives searchers a picture of the storefront.

More interesting to me is the integration with Amazon.com, particularly the fact that every business has a detail page at Amazon. For example, here's the detail page for Wild Ginger, a Seattle restaurant.

If every business has a page at Amazon, you can write reviews of the restaurants, rate the restaurants, even get Amazon.com recommendations.

The ability to evaluate and differentiate local businesses is what has been sorely lacking in Yellow Pages. This new feature brings Amazon and A9 into the same space as guidebooks such as Fodor's, Zagat, and Citysearch.

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