Citysearch is finally coming around to replacing its creaking site design with something a little more contemporary. Today, it is launching in a major rethink of its entire site in beta that drills deeper into neighborhoods, uses Facebook Connect as an optional identity system, and lets users vote reviews up and down. The beta will quickly become the default Citysearch experience. During a demo at IAC headquarters yesterday, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told me:
We’ve been working on it for 10 months and built everything from ground up. In Q1 we will be turning off every system that operates Citysearch today, and running everything in the new environment.
Citysearch’s engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code. By replacing what’s under the hood, they were freed up to make some major improvements that are immediately apparent. The main changes are:
1. Hyper-local content. Citysearch is currently organized by city, so no matter what neighborhood you are looking at you get the same city guide. With the beta, Citysearch has mapped each city by neighborhood and placed each restaurant, bar, hotel, theater, or other local business in a specific neighborhood. So now when you are looking for things to do in a given neighborhood, Citysearch can dynamically create a neighborhood guide complete with restaurants, shops, and other businesses. With this one change, Citysearch is going from 140 cities to 75,000 neighborhoods by the end of the year.
2. Hyper-social content (Facebook Connect). This is one of the biggest changes. Citysearch has only 4 million registered users, but it will now adopt Facebook Connect as an optional identity system. That means anytime someone wants to submit a review or rating who isn’t already a registered Citysearch user will be able to simply type in their Facebook username and password. Any review or rating can then appear on your in Facebook feed, just like with the old Beacon program, except with Facebook Connect it’s all opt-in. (Citysearch was an original Beacon partner, but it shut that down long ago). “Friends love to talk to other friends about local businesses,” notes Herratti.
Even better, anytime you see reviews for a particular restaurant or business,reviews from your Facebook friends will show up first. We were wondering when Facebook Connect partners would start announcing their implementations.
3. Rebalancing the power between reviewers, merchants, and editors. Instead of highlighting Citysearch’s editorial voice, the design has been tweaked so that underneath each entry thereare now three columns representing the voice of the business owner, the Citysearch editor, and the user reviewers. Citysearch reviews have become so crucial for many restaurants and bars that they’ve also become suspect in that many businesses try to game the system. Herrati says:
We are looking to restore the balance of content in the local space. By that I mean we feel UGC has been so powerful in this arena, but it also comes with a bag of issues.
So not only do business owners now have their own more prominent column to promote their business, but the reviews are now voted up or down so that the community can self-moderate the most obviously abusive comments.
4. A better mobile experience Finally, since everything has been remapped by neighborhood, Citysearch is well positioned for mobile apps. But Citysearch is also working hard to optimize the experience for mobile browsers. It is using the geo-location API in Google Gears to surface nearby results for anyone using a phone running Windows Mobile 5 or higher. For everyone else, it remembers the last destination you specified by typing into your phone. t is also working on specific apps for phones with GPS chips. An iPhone app will come later this quarter, and Android and Blackberry apps are also in the works.
Overall, Citysearch is taking some big steps in the right direction. Facebook Connect is going to be huge for the site. With the turn of a switch, it now has social features it would have been nearly impossible to build on its own. Who wantsto become someone else’s friend on Citysearch? But if you can find your existing friends there, that is one more reason to use it.
In practice, it still has a ways to go in terms of bringing up the best results at the neighborhood level. At least that was the case for my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The top result for dining brought up a restaurant that went out of business a long time ago. Too bad you can’t vote search results up and down.
In terms of Citysearch’s business, though, the hyperlocal results will really help with its local search business. The one part of the new Cityseearch that is not open-source is Citysearch Pay, its pay-for-performance ad engine that turns up sponsored results on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. In teh future, it will introduce “event variable price per lead.” Basically, that means businesses will be able to bid on how much they are willing to pay for different types of leads. Viewing a geo-proximate ad on a mobile phone could be one type of lead, texting an address to a friend could be another, as could playing a video profile of a business or making a reservation.
And these types of ads would not be limited to its own site. Citysearch also operates an ad network for partner sites looking to bring more local content. Herrati explains:
Between a quarter and at third of revenues comes from the ad network. If you look at impressions and uniques, it crushes our network.
The ad network’s reach crushes it by ten to one. According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques). By doing abetter job mapping all of its data on local businesses, Citysearch should be able to boost the relevance of its search results and therefore how much it gets paid for them. Maybe Barry Diller should start breaking out results for Citysearch now that IAC is a smaller entity.
http://www.beta...citysearch.com/” rel=”nofollow”>the beta link is dead and the images look like a shitty yahoo site. this is hyperlame.
link is fixed, sorry about that
I can’t access the beta, but the biggest problem with CitySearch was that it was always hard to find places. There were so many options in a cluttered interface that I really just stopped using it. From the screenshot, it does look like it’s much simpler than before. As for the facebook connect features, I don’t think it’ll add value for me.
I do find CitySearch’s sales team to be a really interesting topic. I once saw them in a store trying to get the owner to buy into advertising & website premiums.
Now this is a total makeover! Nice job.
The Beta Link is wrong it should be http://www.beta...citysearch.com/
Not too impressed… The search is weak and couldn’t determine the proper location of a big city in a number of different searches
Nice MakeOver this makes it much more local.
City search can redesign all they want. The site is not the problem. Jay I feel your pain.
I am excited about their changes and look forward to the final new site.
That said, they do have progress to make…
LOL, I saw Wolfgang Puck’s famed CUT steakhouse categorized as a barber shop on the Beverly Hills, CA homepage.
After clicking through, there was even a photo of a salon in what looked like the advertisement placeholder area. (The text content was correct, describing the steakhouse, however.)
(CUT was Esquire’s Restaurant of the Year a few years ago.)
They could, of course, be using the Geolocation API on desktop/laptop as well as on mobile! It works very nicely on laptops using WiFi signals to find the user’s location to within 200m. It’s built into Chrome and is part of Gears on IE, Firefox and Safari.
Note the use of mapquest and you might guess they are intentionally staying away from google software/ APIs.
I prefer local niche sites such as NightCure.com. They tend to know a bit better what is actually going on in their city.
It’s still Citysearch which means its search is very inefficient. Good effort though!
All that hard work ruined by the simple choice to use MapQuest instead of MS Virtual Earth or Google Maps.
STK is awsome in both locations.
$10 Mill says Michael Arrington cant get into Tenjune……
Yelp sucks!!!!!!!!!!
Jay, Rob and team have pulled off the impossible by rewriting a 10 year old complex app that still had Oracle, Dephi, etc in it while still growing the business. And they did this at IAC, not exactly a place with alot of past history letting people bet on a technology transition versus a brand strategy. This took guts and leadership to follow through.
Sweet! im emailing this link back to 2001 when I still cared
If you didnt care, why did you take the time to watch the video and review the page??? Very nice (duh!)
This is a giant improvement for Citysearch, irrespective of all the Comscore / Google Analytics squabbling. Sure, there are lots of bugs in it (I had to try 3 times before successfully signing up via FB Connect), but I guess that’s what makes it a beta release. Nice job.
This is awesome! Their old site looked so dated, I knew it was due for a revamp, and it looks like I got my wish! It’s so much cleaner and streamlined, and it’s only in beta – I hope the full site is even better!
And the facebook thing is SO convenient, I might actually start writing reviews now
They still don’t understand local. People are not going to use Citysearch for hyperlocal neighborhood stuff. They already know their neighborhoods better than Citysearch ever could. Pretty useless concept actually. Useless like so many mobile apps telling me what restaurants are around my neighborhood. I already know that info and pretty much know what specials they run, etc. Until Citysearch et al can fully replace the role of a local newspaper, they will continue to be virtual toilet paper.
Hyper Local might be useful when you are NOT in your own neighborhood, but are visiting. I have found this the more likely use.
This is my comment from the yelp article.
I worked for citysearch as well and couldnt wait to leave. They see yelp as a huge threat. The search algorithm is terrible, try going to citysearch right now and do a search for anything and see what results you get. They opened up their search to include reviews, if the word you are searching for is mentioned in a review it will show in the search return. They supposedly made all these great partnerships with big companies and used that to sell advertising but there is no association between citysearch and these other companies. They also fired all of their editors so the local content for all cities is coming from one editor in NY, not very local anymore.
Citysearch’s traffic all comes through google, there is almost no organic traffic at all. Heads up for advertisers, they have something called syndication. This is when you have a monthly budget to spend with them and you arent close to reaching it with a week left in your monthly cycle syndication turns on. Meaning you will reach your budget no matter what it is or what category your business falls under. Syndication is a running joke at citysearch, a business owner thinks all their “clicks” are coming from citysearch.com but 70% of them are coming from this garbage syndication network that isnt even localized. Ask your sales rep for a list of sites in syndication, you will get a good laugh.
I actually run editorial at Citysearch and need to correct Dan — there are dozens of staff editors around the country with more being brought on regularly. New York City alone has five editors and dozens of seasoned local contributors. As for search, this Beta is just the first step and will only get better as the geo is tuned and the data migrates. Thanks.
Robert, thats very interesting. Is Eric still the editor in Boston? No, he isnt because citysearch did a major layoff of all their editorial staff. Biggest mistake they could have made.
Robert, can you clarify syndication?
Robert,
First off, it’s commendable that you take the time to read and respond to comments on sites like this. It shows that you’re willing to listen to users, which is great. I’ve sent in comments to your San Francisco site several times, and have never had the courtesy of any response.
I like the new beta site much better than the current site, and I actually like the ability to drill down to the neighborhood level. I do agree that Yelp is a huge threat to you, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your beta site looks very “Yelp-like”. However, all you’re really doing is creating a “me too” product. Why not try and actually leap frog the competition? You are the market leader, but it’s clear that Yelp continues to gain market share. Unless Citysearch really shakes things up, it’s only a matter of time before they surpass you. I think the biggest problem for Citysearch is your image. Most people I know think of CS as being very old and stodgy. CS is “the man”, and “the man” just isn’t cool.
With all due respect, it doesn’t really matter if you have dozens of editors, or just one working out of West Hollywood. Nobody takes your editorial comments seriously, and in fact, it’s insulting to your users that you even call your employees “editors”. From what I can tell, all they do is follow some sort of company style guide, and spit out 75-word advertorials. It’s a little pathetic. Hiring 20-something recent college grads and giving them fancy “city editor” titles doesn’t actually make them editors. Want to shake things up? How about having the guts to actually separate “church and state”, and create a real editorial group? Hire real editors (not simply HTML hacks), and write real reviews. Not every restaurant and bar, of course, but a random sampling. You could also write music/entertainment reviews, and the occasional op-ed would be really cool (think salon.com). Give users a reason to come back. If you can do this, and also create the type of community buzz that Yelp has, you’ll be very successful. If you can’t do this, then just cut to the chase and eliminate your “editorial” group altogether, as all they’re really doing right now is wasting valuable real estate.
They talked a lot about this new design and it should be impressive but it will take them months to get it working properly.
Also, how can citysearch have local content without local editors??????
Cityseach.com was much better back in the day when it was fully staffed with an editorial department. Over the years it started looking more like a Frankenstein experiment in search engine marketing and a platform for advertisers. Hopefully this is not too little too late for them, but I think there are competitors offering a better product. What’s with hyper-social anyway? That just sounds douchy.
“Citysearch’s engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code.”
Nice dropping of a buzzword, but in this case it looks more like open-sores.
Someone mentioned they should change the slogan from “live like an insider”, well the employees have come up with a great new slogan, “Everybody caps out”. This is refering to the fact that no matter what kind of business you are or what your monthly budget or monthly cap is you will reach it. The sales team gets paid on billed revenue, if they have $75,000 in monthly cap and only $60,000 of that bills out they are losing a lot of money. This is where syndication kicks in, for example, a plumber may get 3 or 4 “clicks” per day for the first three weeks of thier monthly billing cycle, then in the last week all of a sudden there are hundreds of people looking for plumbers and they are getting 50 – 100 “clicks” per day and they reach thier monthly budget with a few days to go in their cycle, setting the account up for a nice upsell. This was the biggest obsticale to overcome, a merchant sees this hyge jump in “clicks” but zero people refer to citysearch in that week.
Hyperlocal is extremely useful for those of us who’ve just moved to new neighborhoods and don’t have the excessive amount of free time to explore our said new neighborhoods that the commenters apparently have.