by Ben Allen

• Added February 22, 2010

A thought to get this started: The way Google analyzes links online is really just a mass analysis of human opinions. The analysis of links offline, using mass amount of mobile device location data is the mass analysis of human actions.  What people say and what they do can be entirely different things.

So anyone that’s been around the online advertising world will be familiar with the famous Google Page Rank algorithm. While maybe no one other than Larry and Sergey truly knows how it works, there are literally small armies of SEM and SEO experts that wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat wondering if they left out an important keyword, or whether they need to pay for links to get a boost for their clients.  It’s a fascinating micro economy that has developed almost exclusively around servicing customers and their interaction with Internet search providers, particularly Google and its $20B in annual revenue.

I haven’t bought search in well over a decade, before Google existed, and am by no means an expert in search, let alone local search, but if you’re looking for more information I’d suggest starting out by reading SEOmoz or Greg Sterlings Skreenwerk blog or reaching out to a local search SEO specialist like David Mihm or Mike Blumenthal who are frequent speakers on those circuits and regularly share some invaluable experiences on their blogs at Mihmorandum and Blumenthals.

But to greatly over simplify, fundamentally there are two main components in play for Google on the web, and how well they translate into a true mobile location aware search is fuzzy at best.  So for the current Google web search here are two key factors being looked at:

1. the content of the site… both what you tell Google the site is about and also the words it finds in the text on the pages of the site itself, including a surprising amount focused on arcane things like underlying HTML tags including title tags, headline tags and anchor text, etc. 
2.  What Google infers about a site from the links created on the site pointing to other sites, and importantly which other sites are creating inbound links to the site.

So for the web, Google obviously has created the best mousetrap.  But the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is that the things that exist in the world around me that I may like to find using a mobile search includes things like my friends, the location of my next bus, a good restaurant, a delicious bag of Doritos, or maybe some information on an item in front of me…. but last I checked none of these things came equipped with a title tag stamped on them.

Interestingly there may indeed be some equivalent linking going on here, but its not hypertext, and it’s not millions of authors of text deciding what is important and deserving of a link, its billions of actual real behaviors. It’s people and vehicles and products trekking around the globe moving between places…  people moving from restaurant to ice cream parlors, buses running their routes, bags of Dorito’s moving from manufacturers to warehouses to store.  The linking idea in the geo spatial world is maybe related to that of the web world, but it’s certainly not the same thing.

So Google is certainly in familiar territory when it comes to positioning itself for the coming local mobile search opportunity, but it’s not a slam dunk either.  Through initiatives like their local business center, and negotiations with purchasing Yelp, they’ve been quite active in trying to create more html content, content that may reveal whether or not a place might serve Doritos or not… but at the end of the day its really just more of the same: text, html on a webserver somewhere and inbound and outbound hypertext links.

So if you started to try to think about what does and doesn’t translates well between web search and mobile location aware local search, forgetting about hypertext links, and html text and tags, what might you look at?

For one thing the breadth of information of interest to you is limited, you don’t care about all the world’s information, you care about a very small segment of that information pertaining to the world directly around you.  But you want deeper more relevant information on these fewer things.

For example the current state of information related to business places is at many times anemic, generally born out of yellow page directory listings where you get name, address phone numbers, and if you’re lucky operating hours. But ideally you’d like to be able to search deeper, for information specifically designed around a potential visit, like the 60 items on the menu, and the 20 available off menu, the most commonly ordered items, the number of tables and seats and the number currently available, as well as how many may be available at the time you expect to get there, etc.

You may also want to know real time details like if certain items are in stock at a store or if people are present at a place, either in aggregate to let you know if a place is crowded or hopping, or specifically if a friend from your social network is present, so you can meet up.

And like the web there will be a huge amount of historical information that can be stored and sliced and diced to provide better a ton of value, but the types of mobile location aware information may be significantly different than just text on a page… for example if location data show a bunch of people walking into an area restaurant, staying there 75 minutes and then leaving, and then 75% of those repeating the process three times a week, then it’s probably  safe to assume that its actually a popular restaurant… and not just some SEO specialist creating a bunch of links to the restaurants website to help suggest that it’s popular.

The one thing you don’t hear too much about is folks trying to figure out ways to physically attach the information directly to places or things and accessing it directly via some sort of wireless technology, rather than expecting the entire web page authoring universe to extract each of the pieces independently and then gathering all the pertinent pieces together on the web and then trying to attach the “best” to a geographic place in the hopes that it’s there and ready when you may need it.  Alcatel Lucent, has made some initial movement in this direction with their Touchatag RFID system, but there is no reason to think that things will stop there.

While there are new player popping up in his market seemingly everyday, some folks that are already getting some press and seem to be doing some innovative things related to these areas include Localeze, FourSquare, Placecast, Milo, NearbyNow and Sense Networks, more on these guys in the next post.