We had the opportunity to attend Library House’s Essential Web event yesterday which aimed to showcase the very best of European innovation from the web. Presentations varied from some Europe’s fastest growing sites such as Jaiku and WAYN through to new exciting new start ups like parkatmyhouse.com and Huddle.

Chaired by a remarkably quick witted Doug Richards, CEO of Library House (also of BBC’s Dragon’s Den Fame),the Essential Web proved to be a invigorating look at the range of web activity currently taking place across Europe.

We were fortunate enough to be also presenting. Within the competition section of the day we were chosen for the ‘Elevator Pitch’ segment where we were given an initial 60 seconds to tell everyone how great welovelocal.com is. Amazingly, despite my rushed presentation, we were voted into the final to close the event, where we went on to voted by the audience as the winning website!

In a room which was more or less a who’s who of the European web community, we were quite shocked, but pleased, by our victory. Thank you everyone who voted welovelocal!

After several application attempts, I was pleased to discover earlier today that our Facebook application has finally been accepted into the Facebook Directory.

I actually finished developing the Facebook application for welovelocal.com a day before the official release but we have had some difficulties getting it into the public directory - two of our applications were rejected for not using Facebook Platform features, even though we really were!

There was speculation that because you have to have an account on welovelocal.com before you can use the application, the Facebook guys were just declining it and I think that is probably accurate. I eventually ended up e-mailing them directly to explain the problem and it seems to have resulted in us getting approved.

In other Facebook related news, watch out for an in-depth tutorial I have written on how you can utilise the Facebook Platform to make the most of their gazillion users and provide useful content for profiles whilst also promoting your own site/service…

The news that Google is to begin collecting reviews has unsurprisingly been a hot topic of conversation in the welovelocal office. In the spirit of things we thought that we would add our two pence to the mix.

Google doesn’t do UGC

Google is a search compnay, they’re in the business of finding things so it strikes us as quite an odd move to begin collating reviews. It would have seemed a more prudent move to begin to actively soliciting reviews from partner sites, a process that to us still seems somewhat random.

Information needs context

Prior to Google the internet was a unorganised place, just finding what you were looking for was hard enough. Now, thanks to Google, we crave more than just information, we crave information with context, information that is tailored to the individual, not the crowd. At welovelocal our aim to recommend you businesses based on your tastes, friends, the area in which you live, and by connecting you with people who are of authority on a given location or business area. A good review is one thing, but a good review submitted by someone of the same age and interests, who works close by, is infinitely more useful.

Getting more people reviewing is a good thing

In all honesty we are enthused by any service that gets people in the mood for reviewing. We want the whole country to get in the review mood, and if Google can help us do that then great. If they catch the bug, we’re confident a service like ours will become significantly more rewarding than Google’s reviewing black hole.

Is this really all about eBay?

The fallout between eBay and Google has been well documented. Google is looking to get a piece of that sweet sweet PayPal action with its new Checkout service. What is missing from Checkout is a trust system like eBays Feedback Score: enter reviews and rating to fill the void.

Google isn’t infallible

There has been a lot of hysteria about Google launching reviews and it is worth gently reminding people that Google isn’t infallible, you only need to look at Froogle, Google Answers, and their end of year balance sheet to realise that.

welovelocal welcomes Google to the world of reviews with open arms.

tags: Google, eBay, Reviews, Yelp

Everyone remembers Ryan Carson’s seminal series of blog posts highlighting the ups and downs of making a great web application. We were big fans of the series, it led us to one of Ryan’s excellent workshops, which helped us lay the foundations for the lovely site you see today. However, Ryan’s blogging and subsequent talks missed one crucial metric that we feel needs sharing with the world. The food behind the top web apps!

In the 6 months that our development team has been busily working they have consumed nearly 100 bowls of soup, and over 120 sandwiches of different varieties (actually both mainly chicken). On the side they have consumed 71 pieces of bread, and 31 green salads. Depending upon where you shop (there’s no Tesco fans in this office) that is around £800 worth of consumables, a metric that any aspiring Internet entrepreneur should remember to include in their books.

NOTE: excuse the less than appetizing pictures, Google image search just isn’t that good.

tags: Ryan Carson, Carson Systems, The Future of Web Apps

Just 14 days after our last release, we’re not running from zombies but instead have pushed out a new version of the site. The primary focus of this version is to streamline features, make things better and maybe add a few fancy features for you to play with.

The biggest new thing you can now do is put search results for businesses on your website in just a few seconds using the Local Search Widget we now provide. Just fill out a form and we’ll generate some code for you to paste into your own pages to immediately show a Google Map with up to 10 top businesses in the area you specify, of the type you specify. Own a hotel? Show your website visitors where the best restaurants are!

You can also quickly get directions to any of the businesses on the site with new integration into the Google Maps website - click the link below the company name on any business page, enter where you are coming from and you’ll be taken to the Google site with directions to that business.

Other more minor changes include:

• Clearer status messages when adding friends and the ability to see your pending friend requests in your Blackbook.
• Ability to tell us about poor search results using a quick form linked underneath the map when you conduct a search.
• Two new profile fields to tell people about your occupation and whether you have a family or not.
• Review breakdowns on your profile in your Blackbook tell you what kind of ratings you give overall.
• If you can’t find a business you can tell us about it in just 2 fields - company name and postcode - and we’ll do the rest to get it added to the site.
• Tweaks to the Facebook plugin to make the text showing in news feeds clearer and less wordy.
• Photos you upload to your profile will now be cropped to make sure they look nice. If you don’t want us to do this then you can use a tool such as Mypictr to resize the photo to 75×75px yourself.
• Plus bug fixes including issues with OpenID, some user’s ages showing incorrectly and improving title consistency throughout the site.

We’re pretty satisfied with the way the site is progressing and with all known bugs squashed we’re going to be working on some bigger features that you can get really excited about. In the meantime, keep reviewing those local businesses - are you in our top 10 reviewers yet?

You’d have to have been living on a rapidly melting iceberg to have missed the fact that global warming is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend a very interesting discussion regarding the role web can play in helping reducing carbon emissions. The gravity of the issues discussed were brought most in to focus hearing David Strahan talking about his recently published book The Last Oil Shock which examines the alarming rate that out oil reserves appear to be depleting. While the debate lacked focus at times, it was clear that we can all play a small role in reducing carbon emissions, though subtle changes in the way we live our life.

Smart businesses seem to be switching on to this trend too, recognising that being environmentally friendly is not only ethically commendable, but can also be good for business. For consumers, however, there still seems to be a lot of conflicting information flying about, as each big business tries to out-wit the other touting their green credentials, which is why we’re starting to work on a new feature which will enable businesses to inform their customers on how they are working towards creating greener services and products. Be it, as simple as using only recycled paper and ink cartridges to sourcing all products locally, we hope to add a new dimension to the way people search for local businesses.

From our research so far, there doesn’t seem to be any standardised mode of assessing how green a particular business is in the UK, so in the truest sense of the web, we also intend to allow users to comment on a business’ green credentials in the event that a particular business is over-earnest in their claims.

I’ll keep you posted with more developments as we get ready to launch our new green feature.

tags: Energy 2.0, David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock, etribes

In our latest update we pushed out a new version of our search engine which has resulted in faster and more relevant search results.

Back in the olden days when welovelocal was still a concept and we were planning the development, we looked at various “out of the box” search tools. There are quite a few available and in the end we decided that we would use the full-text functionality built into the database system, MySQL.

Whether this could be classed as “out of the box” or not is subject to debate but it is by no means a custom solution. Full-text is ideal for searching a lot of large textual database records having the database engine itself handle the search queries. It allows for some fancy things such as natural language search and query expansion where it does two passes to find words relevant to the first term. For it to work we need text for each business that allows it to be identified when the user enters keywords in the search - it is this text that forms part of the index that is searched on. To achieve this, we created keywords for every category meaning businesses within that category would inherit those particular keywords and that the full text index could be built on.

This worked alright without any tweaking but it was soon clear that we needed to make a lot of minor changes to the search code to get the most accurate results. This ranged from removing some more common keywords to hard coding some queries. In addition, we wanted to be able to allow you to search for a company name and have it match exactly or even offer partial matches.

We did not make our own search from the outset because for most things, it is always better to use something someone else has created if it is good enough. Often a dedicated “product” will be refined in more ways with more time and resources spent on it than can be done by someone creating their own solution. This is why, for example, you would not usually write your own blogging software and instead you would use one of the many tools available. It was also thought that in theory, full-text would be able to deliver the results we wanted.

It soon became clear that although it was providing some decent results some of the time, the code was becoming messy due to the hard coded keywords and the results returned by MySQL were not relevant enough. At the heart of this problem was the simple fact that full-text searches for individual words (unless you use boolean searching of course, but we could not force users to do that!) were being ranked in isolation with no consideration for phrase matches. If you searched for italian restaurant then it would find both words and give them equal relevancy ranking. Although this was fine for bigger searches that return a lot of results, searching for something like car repairs would show a lot of entries with “car” in the keywords.

So after much deliberation we decided to ditch full-text in favour of our own searching system which allows for the weighting of keyword matches not possible with full-text. This is combined with the company name exact and partial matching we had already coded to provide you with keyword and company search functionality.

Whilst we’re not as extensive as Google which uses over 200 variables to determine the ranking of results on the page, we factor in a number of different things to try and provide you with the best results for your search. As we get more data, we will be able to further refine the search and even personalise it to your tastes.

tags: ask, evolve your search, search, local search

When we were in the planning stages of the site, we had a look at a lot of other review sites. Not just local review sites, but every type of review sites to see what works and what didn’t.

What we didn’t want the site to be was one of those reviews where every review is either 5 stars or 1 star. A good example of this is eBay. Look at any user feedback there and it’s nearly always along the lines of “recommended A+++++”. Another example is Amazon, most of the products on there have lots of 5 star reviews, due to the fact that mainly fans of the products will be the ones who review.

Obviously, we’re in a different market to eBay and Amazon, but we all know even looking at one of our rivals right now, their 5 latest reviews are four 5 star reviews and one 1 star review. We thought this wasn’t helpful to anyone. How can anyone decide if a business is any good if every business gets the same amount of stars?

This is why we put meanings with our star rating, with 3 stars being ‘As expected’ and so on. We felt this was a fairer way to review. Of course, we were expecting there to be more reviews above three stars than below it, due to various reasons. People tend not to go to bad businesses in the first place, users might get more put off giving a business 1 star if their profile is next to their review, etc.

However, with our rating system, we’ve found that people are much more likely to give 3 and 4 star reviews rather than 5 and 1 star reviews. Our average review score is 3.50, almost exactly half way between 3 and 4 star in fact, which is a lot more useful than everything being 5 stars.

We like giving people good recommendations, that’s part of what we do, so the only way to do this is with accurate reviews and clearer, precise ratings.

I think it is worth mentioning that from the get go welovelocal.com has adopted microformats, cute little bits of code that sit quietly in the background making the extraction of relevant data even easier. Consider the adr microformat for example, contained within it are all a businesses address details, the phone number, street address and telephone number just to name a few.

Our microformat breakdown currently includes around 100,000 adr’s and a few thousand hReviews, all of which we hope to increase in size over the coming months.

You can learn a more about microformats over at the official microformat website.

tags: microformats

Like most web developers, I just love to spend my summer lunch times sitting inside at a computer, doing data mining. I am a bit of a statistics junkie, I love stats, so this is probably the first in a series of statistics-related posts. Hold on, don’t run away just yet!

One of the areas I’ve been looking into is reviews, it’s fascinating what people review sometimes and how they describe the service they get. What I’ve done is gathered all our reviews together and chopped them up into little bits. Then, I’ve counted up all the little similar bits and stuck them back together. In essence, counted the amount of times a word appears. You can probably guess the top words… ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘is’ and ‘to’ are our top five words, but being reviews, I don’t care about the boring common words like this. I’m far more interested in how people describe the businesses they’ve used.

I’ve complied a list of common adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘great’ and ‘terrible’, the words you expect in reviews and compared them against how often they appear. Admittedly, I haven’t factored in phrases, so for example, ‘definitely not good’ would appear as ‘good’ which it isn’t, but I’m sure they will cancel each other out to some extent. So here’s the results…

So c’mon people! Let’s get our dictionaries out and stop using the word ‘good’!