Ghost of Midnight

Neighborhood Name and Search

Andrew Shotland wrote yesterday…

Ian White’s Urban Mapping provides neighborhood data to local search companies meaning when you search for “Starbucks in Soho”, chances are the search engine you’re using uses Urban Mapping’s data to figure out where “Soho” is. Neighborhoods are weird things, most of them do not have defined boundaries of where they start and stop. I sort of know what I’m talking about when I say the “West Village” of NYC but chances are my definition is different than yours.

At SMX Local today, Ian went through the data that AOL accidentally leaked (something like 20 million searches) and found that 9% the search terms people used included what he classified as “neighborhood-specific” terms. Compare that to zip codes which accounted for less than 1% of the searches.