Location search is slowly coming of age, after a childhood rich on promise but suffering numerous setbacks. Like all childhoods, it’s also seemed to have lasted forever, especially for the parents anxious to rid themselves of the endless expenditure and see their prodigy stand on its two financial feet.
OK, enough of the childhood metaphor.
TeleNav have just published their Top Ten list of stores people are searching for on their GPS devices in the US. They are:
1. Wal-Mart
2. Starbucks
3. Best Buy
4. Target
5. Home Depot
6. Sprint
7. Radio Shack
8. Lowe’s
9. Costco
10. McDonald’s
The press release doesn’t publish numbers along with the list, so it’s hard to judge if this is very meaningful information. But assuming that there is some critical mass, I find it interesting for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it’s hard not to find a Starbucks or McDonald’s in the US, based on my (admittedly limited) experience. You can pretty much drive in any direction randomly and come across one very quickly in an urban area. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible to plan a route that didn’t take you past at least one Starbucks if you wanted to drive across any US city?
So, why bother to programme your GPS device to find you one?
Indeed, if you were desperate for something to eat, surely a generic search, as opposed to a specific one would be more sensible, such as “fast food” or even “processed reconstituted meat products” if you were feeling a special need to get burgered?
The other consideration is that I’ve always proscribed to the view that local search is mostly useful to people who don’t know that area - for example, visiting tourists or business travellers. But there’s quite a few names on the list that just wouldn’t be relevant to these types of users. I mean why would a tourist want to find a Home Depot? To do a little DIY on their hotel room?
Which seems to imply that many people are using Location Search to find information out about the area in which they live and work, which I find both illogical and curious. Maybe there is a market for find-my-nearest searches and the historical problem was that it was all just too early. Again.
A space to watch. Could LBS finally be about to graduate, leave home and get a job. D’oh!
From what I understand the TeleNav mobile app, which costs 9.99USD a month, is focused on giving driving directions, so most people who are prepared to pay for this will be drivers, not pedestrians, and they’re not always going to be in the neighborhood of their home or work. I can imagine plenty of circumstances where a driver is in an unfamiliar area and decides he needs to go to a certain store or alternatively knows where the store is but not the quickest way to get there from his current location. This type of application opens up new opportunities for the user. For example someone may normally go to the store they know near their home but now they are able to search for the one near their work and go to that one on the way home instead.
I agree that tourists and business travellers tend to have the greatest need to find certain things locally (not a DIY store that’s for sure!), however there are plenty of substitute services such as the hotel concierge, the tourist guide they brought with them, the free map from the tourist office or hotel with all the Starbucks already marked on them, etc and these come with advice and recommendations as part of the package, so I don’t see tourists and travellers turning in their droves to mobile local search as a replacement – especially if they’re on roaming charges.