The Palore blog!

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.