Local Search Done Right: iBegin Source

Posted in Computers & Technology, Data, Search by Elliott Back on March 20th, 2007.

iBegin source does local search, sure. If I look for laundry service in East Elmhurst I get a veritable list of results, including, in #1 position, the actual location of the nearest laundromat:

That’s enough to convince me that iBegin’s data is high-quality, since it’s the actual data-selling from which they want to make money. Their edge is selling clean, structured, and updated business-information data. You can browse it all online, so you know exactly what you’re getting. For $1000 a state, or $40000 for all the US, they’ll sell you 10,820,477 unique business listings, enriched by:

Deduplication, sorting, and filtering
Geocoding and nearest intersection
Automatic purchasing
Free daily, weekly, and monthly updates
Simple delimited data format

If you were looking to start a web business with this kind of data, iBegin source would be a great place to start. They have a unique edge on others in this market because their data is social data. Anyone viewing an entry can also update it, adding value to the content for all other users:

This might be the first commercial wikipedia-like editing system I’ve seen that could succeed, because everyone wins when the data is updated. Customers who submit a listing or automate posting new items increase their own database, iBegin’s database, and thanks to free updates, help out the entire community.

I read 15 things iBegin Source does better on a blog the other day so I was pleasantly surprised when this showed up on ReviewMe, because it’s an interesting idea. Anything build around sharing data cheaply (well, for that market anyway) is a great idea.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 10:09 pm and is tagged with east elmhurst, delimited data, laundry service, geocoding, editing system, entire community, laundromat, web business, free updates, local search, information data, wikipedia, reviewme, intersection, business listings, high quality, business information, blog, money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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Anonymous 1 year ago 1 point
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First of all Ahmed F. has yet to show that he has gotten the information from anywhere credible. There are many little data brokers out there who will sell you this sort of information, but they usually make up their own rules about how it may be used. I think it is likely he simply appropriated the information from some data broker and decided that he could get rich by selling it geocoded. Second, the supposed free data has no use whatsoever for anyone other than perhaps mass mailers -- it has no place online. It's just a stupid gimmick to drive people to his site. Third, why should other people send him updates if they're paying him for the data? If the data costs money, should it not be reliable itself?

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