YipIt – Deep Local Search for Products and Services

NY-based YipIt launched in September 2008 and provides what the company calls a, "deep local search". Basically the service provides vertical search for a local market. Currently the service is available only for Manhattan and only for the furniture and lighting categories.

Apparently the YipIt team went to every (yes, every) furniture and lighting store in Manhattan and created records for each one of them. From there they created the categories you see on the site allowing you to search for very specific products. The interesting thing is that they have very little content on each page. If they went to every store, why not take a photo(s), post a review of the store and staff, etc. There’s a link to Yelp on each page but why not allow users to post reviews right on YipIt and pull in reviews from other sources as well? If they want to make these merchant pages the best possible page, they need a lot more content than just one paragraph and a static map. Even simple things like public transit options near the store would be a good start.

The team spent a lot of time gathering all of the location data and created a blog called Furnication which highlights the tips they learned about furniture during their content gathering process.

Some NY-based ideas for partnerships for YipIt:

• Outside.In – tie into their local search and provide content syndication
• StreetEasy – tie into results for people looking for apartments or homes – this way people can see what local merchants are in the area
• UpNext – great, interactive mapping service for Manhattan

Peter at Web2NewYork has an interview with the founder James Moran. James discusses the YipIt concept and what’s coming next for the search engine.