Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I just looked on Yahoo for a hotel where a colleague will be staying next week. Because he has Celiac Disease, which my wife also has, my manager thought I`d be able to advise him on where to eat. After finding the hotel in Yahoo, I clicked on the link to see nearby restaurants. The very first sponsored listing was the 800 number for a florist! I had to look twice to make sure I hadn`t clicked the wrong link.

It`s bad enough that I had to wade through 6 pages of sponsored businesses, the farthest of which was 272 miles away, before I got to the actual list of nearby restaurants. But now there are totally unrelated businesses in the sponsored list. I assume they paid to be there, on the off chance that I would remember someone to whom I needed to send flowers.

Am I missing something? Those who know and understand marketing, especially online, what was the point of a florist being in the restaurant list?


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Steve, I also hate that type of situation. I have found local.com to be a great resource for smaller (some large too) businesses. I have made purchases of services and products by finding them on local.com.

I can`t wait until Egaroo.com is larger. (that`s someone from SUN - black2006).


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

Don`t forget the good-old tried-and-true Mapquest, and Switchboard.com where you can get a proximity for restaurants, shopping, theaters, and so forth.

Other than paying to be pushed up to top rankings, I think this is the rapidly escalating game of SEO. It`s heating up, that`s for sure! Everyone wants to fool the search engines into raising the ranks. But, like everything in evolution, it`ll be a good thing.

Consider how a plant evolves defenses to a bug. The bug evolves a workaround. The plant responds, the bug changes. So too, although eventually, if all pages are 100% optimized, we`ll be right back to where we are now, the thing that`s evolving is artificial life!!

All these "attacks" by SEO workarounds force the search engine algorithm writers to respond. They evolve, and SEO writers find another workaround. What`ll come out of it, though, is true human-to-machine interaction, with seemingly real intelligence.

Although we can have machine spell-checkers, it`s nearly impossible to have authentic grammar checking. Why? Because the shades of interpretation are so variable. So although it`s annoying as hell to have to wade through the crap of badly presented results, just think about how fabulous it`ll be when you can simply tell your machine to go look up a decent restaurant, and it`ll "just know" what you mean by that....somehow.

:-)