junior year

There are three trends I’ve written about before that are beginning to converge:  the movement of offline services onto the Internet, the emergence of local search and the existence of websites in foreign languages which target only local or language based markets.  A great example of this is to take any given service, say, pest control, and see what sorts of results come up in foreign language sites in local markets.  Pest control fits our criteria because it’s an offline service being marketed online, it is relevant to local search because people want pest control in their own area and sites on pest control are often posted in foreign languages because they’re local sites that must be accessible to a native population.  If someone in Denmark needs to get rid of a wasp (in Danish:  hvepse) they’ll probably search in the local Google engine instead of Google.com.  This is because, quite naturally, having a household pest problem in Denmark necessitates finding someone to solve it for you that is in Denmark.  If you have ants (in Danish:  myrer) all over your kitchen, typing in “pest control” to Google.com probably won’t yield you a relevant result (though it will soon, because Google is expanding local search results).  However, you see the macro trend here:  as offline businesses move their advertising online, each service has a different reach depending on its local market.  Pest control companies in Denmark want business from their local Google, in Danish, while companies in the U.S. want business from Google.com, in English.