LocalBizBits Local Search Marketing Information and Resources
Today we finish up our interview with Jason Stubblefield, President of Flatland Industries and Geothingy.com.
Before we continue today Jason, can you tell us a little about yourself.
A. I have over 20 years of experience with computing, programming and networking. I have owned several business in my life, prior to this I owned a hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I moved from back to my hometown, Kansas City, just before the invasion of Iraq. I started Flatland Industries here in 2005. The purpose of the company is to develop some ideas and prototypes I had been working on into products. Geothingy is our first offering, and there is some other really exciting stuff in the pipeline right now.
Q. Great. What is the story behind the logo?
A. The symbol in our logo is the Japanese Kanji character for “go beyond”. Geothingy was designed to provide results beyond the scope or capability of whole web search engines. We were brainstorming and ran across the symbol. It fit.
Q. What is your vision for the future of Geothingy.com?
A. We want Geothingy to be the go-to source for local search results. We want to add more cities and grow our url lists for the cities we already serve. We will also be putting up directory sites to compliment the search results. Support for more languages and geo-tagging are a couple features you can expect to see in the future.
Q. What else do we need to or should know about the site/service?
A. Anyone can have a say in the content of the search results. By using the editing screens at http://edit.geothingy.com anyone can add and remove urls from the list that our crawler uses to create search indexes. If you think something is missing, you can add it, and if you think something is irrelevant you can remove it. This collaborative approach is already producing very complete local search results.
Q. What is your view of local search as it stands today?
A. I think local search is really still in it’s infancy. Even the major players in the industry like Google and Yahoo are just presenting results from their whole web index with a map attached as local search. There is more evolution that needs to happen before we know what local search is really going to be.
Q. Where do you see local search going?
A. I think that the one size fits all search engine is going to be slowly replaced by smaller more specialized search engines. New technology like geo-tagging and open source maps present interesting new potential. Google may be fine when I need to find a good php tutorial, but not when I need to find a good sandwich in Kansas City.
Thanks Jason for your time and good luck with Geothingy.com
