What Siri Means for Local Search

My dad just got an iPhone 4S as a gift from my family. He’s never been the most tech savvy person in the world. I for one was apprehensive about getting him a touchscreen smartphone given his Kindle is sitting in a drawer and his reliance on print newspapers. He insisted on showing me this thing called “Siri,” unaware that I’m fully familiar with the platform from their pre-Apple days.

He was primarily using Siri to conduct restaurant searches. For him it was easier and much more natural to just speak rather than go to the app store, find a restaurant app, download it, then manually search for a restaurant.

What might amount to the most important (but not the largest) deal in the digital food space happened behind closed doors without fanfare or a press release. That deal is the one between Apple (Siri) and Yelp.

If you used the old standalone Siri app, you would have seen restaurant and other small business results returned from Citysearch, Yelp, Gayot, OpenTable and others all mixed in. It was basically the equivalent of what you might get in a Google search result. Now with Siri in the iPhone 4S, your restaurant results are curated by one reviewer only; Yelp. Plenty of people will download apps, but for people like my father, they have an answer machine that tells them the weather, where to eat, and apparently has an answer to the meaning of life (ask it). Seeing it in action, I could easily see myself using it for simple searches and I used to design restaurant apps for a living! I suspect that local search and weather are the top two search uses for Siri.

What happened to those other restaurant review sources? Who knows. What I do know is that Yelp has taken a huge step in the mobile space. They’ve essentially cut off their competitors before they even had an opportunity to compete in voice search on iPhone. If Siri continues to catch on the way it has, I fully expect Voice Search to be a new competitive search platform. Everyone will want to rank, except this is a party few partners will be invited to in order to make it a better experience. People want answers, not a dozen sources that have answers.

If the restaurant listings start to go deeper than just the Yelp ratings, which is possible in the future, this essentially provides them with a vertical monopoly in voice search on the most ubiquitous device out there. It also ties Apple closely to Yelp in terms of their content strategy. A big player in mobile tying their strategy to a restaurant review platform… why does this sound familiar? Ultimately it was Apple that managed to make the first bold move.

1. steurermgwu38277 reblogged this from ryenyc
2. krumviedaieft95954 reblogged this from ryenyc
3. modeto029 liked this
4. thecresto liked this
5. ryenyc posted this