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Many local search sites boast wide and deep data in their business listings. We decided to take a closer look by analyzing the Food & Dining category in New York City on 20 leading local sites.

We focused on two parameters:

1. The number of listings (e.g. restaurants, coffee shops, bars etc.) available in each site.

2. The total number of business details available for the above listings. These include attributes such as description, cuisine, video, reviews, opening hours and wine details. We excluded the names, phone numbers and addresses from the count, and when encountering more than one review per business we counted it as just one attribute.

We found great variance between the sites both in the number of listings that they have and in the richness of the data available per listing. For example, New York Magazine has a relatively low number of restaurants but the highest number of rich details per restaurant (8). In the overall analysis, CitySearch comes out as the local site with the most comprehensive data.

The above data is based in part on Palore’s data extraction system which collects, normalizes and merges local business data from millions of Web pages.

Please share your thoughts and let us know what other data comparisons you think would be interesting – in other verticals (e.g. auto dealerships or realtors), on a geographic basis (e.g. data analysis per city overlaid on a US map) or in any other format.

To acquire rich local business data in any vertical, please contact Palore’s sales team.

In the last few months we kept busy acquiring content from hundreds of sources. We crawled, aggregated, normalized, cleaned and… sold our data feeds in various verticals. Nothing out of the ordinary here. But then something interesting happened. While we typically sell our aggregated content feed as a single dataset without breaking it up into its separate sources (our clients like getting a single, unified and normalized feed), about a month ago we were asked to leave the content in its raw format. We shrugged our shoulders and did what the client asked for.

The following week we got an excited call from the customer who said “Guys, did you know that Site X has double the listings of Site Y in the East Coast but very poor data in Southern California?” Our initial response was “Yes, but who cares?” Well, apparently a lot of people do. That got us thinking about sharing this data with the world. Here’s the gist of it:

Palore crawls data from hundreds of local sites and that gives us a good outlook of what content is out there. Just like Comscore or Compete have comparative data about unique users per site, we have comparative data about the depth and width of each site’s content. We also have a good view of the aggregated data that’s out there in ALL of the local sites. For example, we can tell how many auto dealerships are listed on the top 10 auto sites in each state, or which local site has the most information about Sushi restaurants.

In the coming weeks we will share this information. If you’re interested in any specific type of comparative information, let us know!