Mainstream Local Search Maps must have a scalability problem

Posted: Saturday, October 08, 2005 2:57 PM by Barry Gervin

“Tim Horton's near Hamilton, ON” should be a test case for any good local/map search enginge.

MSN Local?

http://search.msn.com/local/results.aspx?q=Tim+Horton%27s&w=hamilton%2C+Ontario%2C+Canada&FORM=QBXR

In MicroSpeak, I'm “super“ disappointed. Come on, not even close. Like I really need to drive to New York State to find a Tim's. At least you have 9 listed, that's more than I expected in NY. And what's up with the “residential listing“. Can I do that? Can I get a Tim's right in my house. Sweet.

Google?

http://www.google.ca/local?hl=en&lr=&q=tim+horton%27s&near=Hamilton,+ON&sa=X&oi=localr

Nice try. At least I don't need a passport and more change to cross the toll bridge than the actual price of a coffee. But I'm still finding it hard to believe there is only one Timmy's in Hamilton.

And for the record, there is, according to the horses mouth, 78 Tim Horton's within 10km from the epi-centre of Downtown Hamilton. (http://web.sa.mapquest.com/timhortons/advantage.adp?transaction=search&county=&country=CA&radius=10&units=km&pwidth=400&pheight=324&maxsearchresults=100&address=&city=Hamilton&stateProvince=ON&postalCode=&searchradius=10km&x=62&y=27)

I should qualify that by saying “as of October 8th, 2:55pm”. We really need an MSN Alert or an RSS feed for this kind of data.

Update: Reader Kevin MacDonald of Pentura points out that FindByClick.com has market on caffinated google mashups. Here's a focused Hamilton Tim's Link. Kevin - I owe you coffee!

Comments

Barry Gervin

November 15, 2005 2:37 PM
Actually, google maps works fine. The problem is that you put an apostrophe before the s in "Tim Hortons" when, for whatever reason, none exists (see logo at http://www.timhortons.com/).

What you found was the one misspelled Tim Hortons in Hamilton :)

Barry Gervin

November 15, 2005 2:49 PM
Okay - sure Google comes up with 10 and officially beats MSN Search on the issue - but come on - that is still less than 15% of the # of Tim's in Hamilton.

Barry Gervin

November 15, 2005 4:04 PM
The 10 is only a subset -- but of course it doesn't tell you that :) This is something that I didn't notice for a while too until I was searching for Subway restaurants in my area once and finally figured it out.

On the map, it only shows the results that are listed on the left of the screen, which are only the first 10 results. The confusing part is that there's no indication that this is only a subset. If you click the arrow at the bottom of the list next to the "1", you'll get the next 10 results, and they show up on the map. You can continue clicking this arrow to get subsequent pages of results. I don't get why they don't show how many pages there are or better indicate that there are more results.

What is nice is that it gradually expands the geographic search area as needed when you click the arrow for more results. Actually, I guess this explains why it doesn't indicate the number of results, because this would be huge as it keeps expanding the search area out to potentially the world level, and the results are meaningless at that point since it's no longer "local". i.e. it doesn't know how "local" you want to look.

It would be nice if there were a way to specify how many results at a time are retrieved.

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