Welcome to everyone’s guide

This has been a long-time coming. The seed was planted way back in 1998 as a result of extreme frustration in finding anything on a search engine. Those were the days of extremely complicated boolean searches – necessary to weed out all the sites that loaded their keyword meta tags with every word imaginable (why they thought that a searcher looking for bridal shops in Boise or information about Shakespeare would actually be interested in their porn site, I never could figure out!).

I knew what I wanted to find, and that it was impossible to do so through search. I also realized that there was a hole in web search – the same hole there had always been in the Yellow Pagesâ„¢. For a long time, even as late as 2002, a business couldn’t get a Yellow Page listing unless they had a business phone line, an investment many small home-based business owners weren’t willing to make. That has changed somewhat recently with the advent of cell and digital phones, but Yellow Page advertising is still prohibitively expensive. Unless you’re willing to spend big bucks you get this little, one-line listing … in one book. And which one do you choose, especially if you service an urban area? As I said, the same hole existed on the web. Sure, more and more businesses over the years have invested in websites, but it can be a pretty intimidating prospect – design, development, SEO, SEM. Those costs are prohibitively expensive as well, and what small business owner wants one more thing to worry about?

As the web became more and more popular between 1998 and 2001, I thought “somebody’s going to fill the hole, someone with the resources to go after it is going to realize that there are millions of businesses out there with products and services to sell and no web or Yellow Pages presence”. But nobody did. I came up with a way to tackle the problem in 2000, but the method would have been akin to draining the Great Lakes with a straw and bucket. Nonetheless, I was prepared to forge ahead. Then came the burst in the bubble – the dot com crash. Attempts to get funding were met with negative head shakes and the dire “internet businesses fail” (tell that to Googleâ„¢ [snicker]).

So, on the shelf it went. Until now. The time is ripe and, thanks to the powers that be, even though my idea has been percolating out there in the global consciousness for almost 10 years, no one else has filled the hole. I’m ready. The web is ready. Search is ready. All those millions of small businesses are ready. All of those searchers performing millions upon millions of “local” searches daily are ready.

Time to bring it on …

Welcome to everyone’s guide!!!