The media group Transcontinental launched last Thursday weblocal.ca, which as the name suggests, is a local search website for Canadians wanting to find local businesses.
Transcontinental launches regularly new web destinations, be it web magazines, blogs and portals, in 14 different vertical markets. Weblocal is different though from their previous projects since it allows users to sign up, review + recommend businesses, tag them, as well as upload pictures and photos. It also has a mobile version. Lots of user-generated content then, which puts weblocal in the same category as other websites such as monavis.ca or praized.
Searching for places gives the user a classical list of nearest places matching the search keyword. If there were options to sort search places by most recommended places, I haven’t seen it. Of course, I don’t know the perfect formula for local search websites, but so far weblocal leans more towards a classical directory like yellowpages than a website which takes advantage of user-submitted content to provide more relevant results.
As stated earlier, it’s a crowded space. Right now, if I’d want to find hang out at a good place with a good experience, Praized shows places which has been “validated” by your network, while monavis (a Yelp clone) provides a list of places reviewed by the “crowd”. Of course Weblocal is just launching; and they do highlight that the website is targeted to local communities, so we’ll wait a little bit before giving a final verdict.
Comments
emad November 04, 2008
weblocal has tools to connect with “neighbours” and to get recommendations from them. When you are viewing a business that has been reviewed by your neighbour, you get a special section that shows you their comments and ratings.
Currently, our search engine tries to give you the most relevant results…distance is a part of what we define as relevance but we’re not simply returning listings sorted by distance. Just because a business provides you with more user-submitted content may be the right idea but it must be done correctly to ensure you are still getting the most relevant information when searching. Doing this and adding sort functionality is something we are currently working on and spending to make sure we do it right.
Your feedback is always appreciated. We care about what our users say and give a lot of importance to their feedback. After all, our users should be the ones that define the product. Stay tuned as there is a lot more features coming! :-)
Thanks
Emad
Daniel Haran November 04, 2008
emad: In Firefox, AdblockPlus hides the google map on search results.
I don’t get why this ought to be compelling to end users. Judging from the slickly produced (and corny) ad on their front page, I surmise this project will be marketing driven.
If it weren’t for corporate life-support, I would predict imminent death for this startup.
Heri November 05, 2008
also I think the design should be improved.
emad November 06, 2008
Thanks for the feedback. There actualy are a lot of differences and we’re planning more.
For example, we’ll be exposing or building features (you can view some of them now on the site) that will allow you to search by what is currently open, dig deeper into what is online about various businesses, see ratings graphs and distributions (already launched a full 9 months before others started replicating it), proprietary recommendations engine based on more than just viewing patterns (but, instead, based on behaviors across the whole Internet), sms & voice (telephone) and IM-based search, video reviews, and more (which will be revealed later). We’re definitely taking a very aggressive approach to development and looking to push the envelope.
…but don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we’re the best. We’ll constantly be seeing what is happening in the marketplace, soliciting user feedback (we have forums that anyone can view all the complaints, recommendations, etc and we like that open format), and continually rethinking our product.
Thanks!
Emad
Heri November 06, 2008
sounds exciting!
John November 09, 2008
Heri November 09, 2008
My thinking is that it’s very hard to do local search.
The proof is that nobody is dominating that space. Lots of contenders (yelp, yellowpages, praized, etc.) but we still have yet to see the web service bringing the answer.
which means it’s open for all to try… I’m looking for new projects like weblocal. You never know