welovelocal.com got vocal and joined Jemima Kiss over on the Guardian’s ‘Elevator Pitch’ as part of the Tech Weekly podcast. Both Max and Dan rode the ‘lift of doom’ all the way to the food hall - and answered some good questions along the way. If you want to hear the guys talking shop about welovelocal.com it is well worth a listen. If you don’t fancy it much there are plenty of other interesting people on the Tech Weekly podcast to listen to including some good discussions about Europe’s dotcom startup’s from Aleks Krotoski, and if Sillicon Vally is really where it is at from Loic Le Meur.

As you may well know by now welovelocal has been busy working on new ways to make the site better for you. Not only have we launched nationwide, but we have also got some very nice new features to tell you all about.

Ok, kicking off with the most obvious of them all - the welovelocal.com homepage! We now have a snippet from the blog on the bottom, next to that is a taste of some great press that we have been so fortunate to receive. As you may have noticed we have also re-named ‘My Blackbook’ and ‘My Groups’ to ‘Your Blackbook’ and ‘Your Groups’, this change was made after an inspirational presentation from Erika Hall of Mule Design Studio at The Future of Web Apps. In a nutshell it just makes more sense for us not to name things ‘my’ when really they are ‘yours’!

Now here is where it gets exciting….

welovelocal.com is essentially a business directory and we really want to make use of all our great directory pages, they are a great resource for locating shops, restaurants, pubs, plumbers and much more in any area as they take you straight to where you want start searching. We have jazzed these pages up a bit and here’s what we’ve added:

Flickr Photos
As you can see on the homepage we have the most ‘exciting cities’ listed. By clicking on these you are magically transported to a world/directory dedicated to a city. There you will find our lovely Flickr API which will present you with Geo tagged photos of your area. So if you currently have any photos on Flickr of great cities and would like them to appear on welovelocal.com then make sure you Geo tag them – it would be great to see some of your interesting photos!

Tell us what’s great about your city!
On the same directory pages we now have a space for you to have your say, titled ‘what’s Great About (insert city)?’ We want you to share your local knowledge and tell us, and everyone else what is so great about your city or area.

Suggest a link
We also have a space for you to suggest and share any great links that you may have hoarded away relating to a particular place. For example you may want to share a link to a great local website that has gig listings or a great local blog that has awesome photos of your city.

Enough about us, we want to hear more from you, tell us what is great about you city – and don’t forget to suggest a link!

As I mentioned last week, welovelocal.com has been working on some changes to the site and today we are very proud to announce that we have officially launched across the UK. That’s right; you can now search and review the best local businesses all over the country. Gone are the London only days, the UK is now your oyster!

This is really exciting stuff, not only for us here at welovelocal.com, but also for all you reviewers out there, the reviewing possibilities are now endless.

We’ve been overwhelmed with the response from our London members, so let’s keep the momentum going, spread the word that we’re officially nationwide and start sharing your local knowledge wherever you are.

If you run a business, then join the conversation too - sign up and advertise for free to start connecting with new customers and grow your business on-line.

We really hope you enjoy your new improved welovelocal.com, we certainly do!

We would love to know what you think!

Excitement!

The welovelocal team has been very busy working away on ways to improve and expand the site and all our efforts have almost paid off ….almost!

So, we have some changes happening on the site over the next week, while these changes are very exciting, they may cause the site to misbehave a little or just look a bit strange from time to time. Please bear with us, we all have our bad hair days and welovelocal is no exception. We are working on it, and I guarantee that the site will be all the more improved for the changes.

Admittedly, we have been a little tight lipped lately regarding changes to the site.The truth is we have been saving all our lovely developments up, and they are soon to be unleashed!

We very are excited, watch this space….

Scrap that…..watch this site!

Many of you have recently got in touch to draw our attention to some linking issues we’ve been having, and we thought it best I explain whats been going on for those still in the dark.

Without going into to much detail, a few weeks ago we were required to slightly alter the way in which some of our URL structures work, more specifically, for the individual business listing pages such as this one of Cafe Kick. The problem this has created is that in some circumstances where the URL used is of the /business/ variety the destination is an error page rather than the intended business. This type of link is used most commonly within your Blackbook and in the Facebook App, so, unfortunately, until new reviews populate your Activity monitor / Facebook profile, you’re going to have a couple of instances of broken links.

Needless to say we’re really sorry for any annoyance this may have caused you. Know that the changes are for the best in the long run, and will make for a much sleeker, shinier, welovelocal.

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

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