Rankings in the search marketing game just become a lot easier if you are the ‘local’ or the ‘small’ guy in town. A creation from Praized Media, a Montreal based social media company launched a new platform on July 9, which allows users to rate local businesses and offer comments regarding products and services.

Praized Media’s offering is one of the first of its kind, where users are completely responsible for the rankings and success of the businesses. Praized is set up on the site where readers can ‘praize’ or ‘raze’ the business. The more praizes a company has, the higher its ranking is on the site, increasing its visibility. When a business gets a raze, it sinks in the listings. Rankings are not aided by paid advertising spots or sponsorship to any local charity or group.

Praized is offered as a free program to web publishers of blogs, social media and other community sites. Users perform a local search for a business, restaurant, service, doctor, dentist, vet or any service they need. The platform comes pre-populated with over 17 million listings from North American businesses and companies. New listings can be added by anyone and given tags, a map and description. The more details a business has, the better their profile looks and the more attention and potential customers it will attract.

According to their website: “Our platform captures, organizes and aggregates local conversations about places.” The large search engines have failed to do it locally, so Yellow Pages.com and Yellow Pages.ca jumped in to partner with Praized Media when they heard about the venture.

Users are called praizers and they can set up their own profile. Praizers are the cornerstone for the software to work, so they have the ability to:

· Vote on favorite places

· Tag and bookmark favorite locations

· Share their favorites with other praizers

Each profile has links to their community, their favorite places within that community, their friends and acquaintances.

Winners from the new platform are the web publishers who earn ad revenue by clicking. Advertising money always follows local searches, making advertisers and people who reap the advertising dollars happy. Since the directory listings market is worth over $30 billion dollars a year, there will be many local directory publishers who are happy too.

The real winner from people using Praized is the local business who does not have a large advertising budget. The local business can get ‘word of mouth’ advertising by getting users to praize them online, thereby increasing their visibility. The more praizes they get, the more people will use their services. Everyone knows how valuable word of mouth is too gaining new customers.

Subsequently, when a business is razed, or receives negative feedback, people will also know and choose other services who are rated higher. Clicking for ratings works as fast as or faster than word of mouth, with both good and bad feedback.

Since this is a community-minded site, it also allows users to flag other user comments or reviews that are inappropriate or slanderous. Comments that slam a single individual for no reason or look to be competition trying to hurt other business will be removed. Moderators are in place that handle all inappropriate responses.

By Elizabeth Gage | Comments (0)

Semantic technologies may not be the answer to computationally complex searches but they do have value in helping us represent relational data spread over the web. As we evolve to Web 3.0 there are a number of players in this space including SearchMonkey (Yahoo), Freebase, Hakia and Powerset (Microsoft) who are all attempting a solution on how to make the search experience easy, fast and relevant. (Of course we cannot leave Google out of this discussion).

Powerset, recently purchased by Microsoft, is attempting to take search to the next level by adding “understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words” in searches and webpages. They have chosen Wikipedia as a destination to display their technology as it is a formidable site for millions of people searching for indepth information on a wide variety of subjects.

Touted as a “natural language” approach to search, Powerset co-founder Barney Pell along with search engineers and computational linguists, are determined to find a solution to the problem that a third of searches don’t get answered on the first search and click. There are a couple of reasons for this they explain:

* Differences in phrasing or context between a user’s search and what is available on web sites

* Lack of clarity in descriptions on webpages

Search engines typically match words on a search to words on a webpage. Understanding the intent behind the search will deliver better search results for the user. Powerset plans to focus on making the search experience more flexible and on developing tools to improve the results descriptions on web pages.

Powerset has also created an iPhone optimized version of its Wikipedia search browser where users can search by topic, phrase or question. A user is returned a list of Wikipedia sentences derived from Wikipedia articles. Once you click on the search result you want you are taken to a Powerset-enhanced Wikipedia article formated for the iPhone.

The search frontier just became more interesting. Can Microsoft rapidly accelerate building a semantic search technology that translates to the full-scale of the world wide web? And can it catch up to the search giant Google, who seems to have a head start with its 200 million queries a day and huge web index.

The race is on and anything is possible. 

On June 24, the search giant Google, who boasts 70% of all internet searches announced its plan to launch the Google Ad Planner. The Ad Planner is geared to media buyers and designed to provide an “easy” way for advertisers to identify which sites to buy online ads on by telling them which sites their target audience visits. The tool provides specific filters such as age, gender, education, house hold income, information on a site’s reach, unique visitors, and list of keywords that visitors used in the search.

In its beta format the Google Ad Planner appears quick and simple to use. You just create a campaign and click on “research” to get your results. Instantly a list of target sites pop up. The sites in the list show the category, competition index, unique visitors, country, reach, pages views, ad format accepted and impressions a day. Its all very straight forward – except for one thing. Some of the sites are a little odd.

Google site categories are determined  from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data and other third party market research.

Entering the measurement field with the likes of Comscore, Hitwise and Nielsen Online who also provide similar online demographic and traffic measurement is no easy feat. While Comscore and Nielsen use panels and web users to collect data and Hitwise takes more of the network approach collecting data from ISP networks – all these companies provide much more robust analytical products and services.

The Google Ad Planner is an interesting tool that attempts to categorize online spend for advertisers from a technology and traffic perspective. As we move to web 3.0 and the search industry matures, metrics will be needed to provide advertisers, hungry for ROI, with better information on the makeup and intent of visitors.