Local discovery and its future

Speaking about local search, it is important to point out some of the recent developments and technology that will have an impact both in the short and the long-run.

Today, we live in an exciting era for local marketing tools that will change the way users discover places.

Big Data

When it comes to local searches, proximity is the most important ranking factor. That doesn’t seem to change. However, it is the filter that presents, ranks and sorts out the nearby locations that will change. What filter are we talking about?

You are the filter.

Local discovery will work as proximity that has been filtered by your needs and preferences. The person who is searching will be the one to tell what locations are shown.

Actually, this is nothing new. Major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo have been tracking the browsing history in order to personalize the search results. The new thing is the perfection of artificial intelligence and Big Data analytics.

Big Data will now help search engines personalize local search results based on users’ individual preferences. The more the search engine knows about you, the more relevant search results and maps will show up.

Online assistants and voice search

Online or digital assistants will be the connection between customer profiles, the locations they are interested in and products around them.

Today, digital assistants will be present everywhere. On your smartphone, in your house, your car your office. In other words, they will be in any place with internet connection.

Therefore, the assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri will become the universal connection between the physical and digital worlds.

Move to augmented reality

With the growing popularity of voice search, you will need to replace the traditional screen on your smartphone and monitor. A picture can render more than a thousand words can, so it doesn’t seem that even a human-like-talking digital assistant will replace our need to see what’s in front of us.

A great solution is to replace the traditional screens with augmented reality. According to Facebook’s latest related to augmented reality, this indeed seems to be the direction we are oriented towards.

Augmented reality will perhaps be an exciting and less privacy-intrusive local discovery development. This will give the opportunity to search for a local restaurant, visualize the exact location of a product right on a shelf or deal with personalized location-based content with beacons. Now, it’s time to keep an eye on beacons.

Beacons

Beacons are a perfect solution in terms of surfacing content in a user’s proximity. The challenge right now is to draw users’ attention to beacons. Nonetheless, if everybody has a digital assistant built in their augmented reality glasses, it will be easy to discover beacon content and personalize it based on your preferences.

This article was written by Rankwinz