The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

The Zip Code Comes First

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Tony Gentile at buzzhit! discovers that the ZIP code’s gotta be first for local search to work on Yahoo! because:

We have historically not supported users entering the ZIP after the query term, because the level of false positives for Query followed by ZIP is actually very high.

Interesting stuff. One side of me says they need to start training end users to put the ZIP code first, but the other side thinks they need to start working on their search technology so it can handle queries either way. I’m dying to see statistics on how much local search queries have increased (and what form they take) since Yahoo! and Google have introduced their specialized offerings.