Yokel: Local Shopping Search (Social Coming Soon!)
I had the pleasure today of talking with Scott Randall, CEO of Yokel, a soon-to-hard-launch local shopping search engine. The premise is simple: Yokel's a "search engine for local shopping... the problem we're helping consumers solve is where can I find X in local store near me."

I had to ask him - why Yokel instead of (my little darlings) Yahoo Local or Google Maps?

First off he busted out with boston.yokel.com, his first city-centric extension of the Yokel concept to show why Yokel instead of the giants.

His Yokel-supremacy PR search (GenieKnows has a GenieKnows-supremacy PR search too ;) is [ipod] + Boston area code [02128]. (For the record - I didn't push his data base around that much with multiple queries. I welcome, and I'm sure he would too, your tests and your impressions.)

Here's Yahoo Local [ipod] + [02128]:

Here's Google Maps [ipod] + [02128]:











And here's Yokel:







Notice something missing from Google and Yahoo?

That's right. They're called relevant results.

The Challenges of (Truly) Local Shopping Search
"The bar, from a consumer experience, is higher in local shopping search," Randall told me. "If I'm doing pediatric cancer search [heaven forbid -ed.] I'm trying to shed some light on the subject, but I'm not an expert."

"When I do local shopping search, I'm an expert on it... as a consumer I know enough to be dangerous. I can prove the search engine wrong. The consumers are going to know stuff that the search engine doesn't know."

In addition to consumers who will test and anecdotally rank your service in print, local shopping search faces some major indexing issues given that local business data is scattered across databases, often hard to find, and, if a business has no web presence, uncrawlable.

Yokel's index is built from online and offline sources, a combination of spidered websites and offline data "we compile from licensed sources, manufacturers, and retailers."

"Even finding out where a home depot is is not trivial - there's lots of data stuff like finding the right phone number for the store."

Yokel then tags stores with as many attributes as possible, including products, categories, and brands.

"Solving the data problems, collecting and serving it in the right way is a hard problem to solve," Randall said, but allowed that this is, "good from a competitive standpoint."

His ipod 02128 search certainly seems to prove this.

Social Local Shopping Search
Though there's not currently a social element to Yokel's search, Randall agreed that a social element - probably some sort of tagging - the strongest way to bridge the gap between what the local experts know and what the search engine can't.

In addition, if there are sales at local stores users in the network could notify each other, leave store reviews, etc... I also see strong synergies between Yokel's functionality, the ReadExpress hyper-targeted concept and PreFound's social search tools.

Social is definitely coming soon, Randally told me, though he owned that building the local shopping database has to now been Yokel's primary focus.

Monetization
Out of the gate they offer free index inclusion, which, for now, leaves monetizing with Yahoo paid search ads.

"Over time," he said, "we will establish relationships with individual local companies to sell coupons and added services." In the near term they will be using back fill, though may eventually have an interface to upsell listings to local businesses with things like coupons and bold listings. It now occurs to me that ppcall would make sense for Yokel.

Yokel + Maps
Yokel may be, to some extent, shifting my thinking about maps as the doorway to local. There ARE maps in Yokel, using the Google Map API (hey Google Maps Mania!), but they don't use the map to display initial search results.

"We don't display search results on the map because if there's ambiguity about what you're looking for the results on a map don't make any sense." Randall also holds that searchers are only interested in the maps once they've identified the store that actually has the product they're looking for.

Original Data Compilers
Yokel's crawled regularly by Yahoo and Google (has anyone spotted their results in the wild?).

Randall's Work History
Randall started the online auction ASP FairMarket in 1997, took it public in 2000 and sold it to eBay in June of '03 for $4.5 million in cash.

Prior to FairMarket Randall worked in ecommerce for Yahoo Marketplace, which became Yahoo Shopping, and in '94 was involved with the etail company necx.com.

The Yokel Duo
For the Yokel project Randall brought in Don Zereski, who was the VP of tech at Tripod, which sold to Lycos, where he "ran all of product." His work there involved search algorithms, and so he's been crucial in setting algorithmic directions for Yokel thus far.

Lycos had been a FairMarket customer, which is how Randall and Zereski met, and they "gradually spent more and more time on [Yokel] and then it became our full time jobs."

Randall promised to stop by Search Engine Lowdown to leave feedback on this post.

Scott, here are my follow up questions for you:
What's your next city for expanding into?

Also, what have you learned from getting local Boston shopping listings that you can apply to your next city?

Also will you enable data feeds for local businesses so they can update your database?

Also should I have asked you about local shopping search competitors besides Google and Yahoo? Am I comparing apples to oranges and making you look really good because I don't know the local search space well? Is this a better question for Greg Sterling ;)?

Also are you doing anything to enable stores to connect the entirety of their local in-store inventory to the web? I mean like real-time product availability?

Also, what about mobile (sheesh how'd I miss that one?)?

More Reading:
Local Yokel
Greg Sterling Drills Down Into the Local Ecosystem
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |