Last Friday, Google posted on its Lat Long Blog that Google Maps now has neighborhood search capability. To any but the most savvy users, this could be very misleading. Here’s the part that intrigues me:
Recently Google Maps introduced the ability to perform searches by neighborhoods. Neighborhoods tend to be somewhat informally defined but well recognized in certain cities. Neighborhood search is now available in fifty US cities, with more to follow.
The part about “informally defined” seems to be loophole to me. And then there’s the caveat of “only available in 50 US cities” which is the misleading part (since the title of the blog post doesn’t specificy “which” neighborhoods).
All this aside, I played along to see what the results would look like in Kansas City. Granted, KC is not the biggest metro in the country, but it’s respectable. My first search for art galleries on the Plaza gave me only one gallery that was actually on the Plaza (I know of at least 10 more). The other two results were in Kansas as far south as Leawood since Google didn’t know the difference between the Plaza and Hawthorne Plaza out south.
Second, I thought I’d try it on an actual neighborhood. I picked Mission Hills since it’s probably the premiere neighborhood in KC with the likes of Henry Block, George Brett, The Halls family, and The Russell Stover’s mansion being just a few of the well known residents. Looking for coffee around the Mission Hills neighborhood was a little better but not much. Only one of the results would I actually classify as being in Mission Hills.
My point in all this is that true neighborhood search still does not exist. It’s not even close. Google is still simply matching keywords to business listings. An actual framework of neighborhoods just doesn’t exist. Yelp comes close, and Urban Mapping has made some headway, but there still isn’t a true neighborhood level index to search from or serve content to.
Bottom line, it takes a lot of good old fashioned hard work, unique local knowledge, and lot of time to build such a network; and it’s just not economically viable for the large search companies to go down that road.
eNeighbors Blog 
So, other than Maponics, who has neighborhood boundaries in a GIS format?
Very interesting. I have not seen Maponics before now. Thanks for sharing, Darrin. If I’m reading this right, it looks like targeted marketing at a hyper-local level.
Is it all offline maps, or do you have an online ad platform for small businesses to get their services in front of specific neighborhoods?
As far as I knew, there was no neighborhood-specific online network… but I’ve been wrong before. eNeighbors is attempting to create a neighborhood-based network by getting communities online as part of their neighborhood communcations. Then in turn, we’ll be able to serve ad content to those targeted areas.
Things like Google’s Adsense are still too general/high-level for small businesses to effectively use their marketing dollars if they just want to market to a small area immediately around their business.
Hey Phil, Maponics is a mapping company that of course creates maps and does map-related projects for clients. But the neighborhood GIS – polygons – data is licensed out to online sites, portals, and media companies.
I agree about adsense – if I were a small business serving customers locally it wouldn’t be useful. If a company could incorporate neighborhood boundaries and other local-relevant information, that could be more attractive to the average small business.
Factle Maps (the original creators of maponics neighborhood data) are selling the data sets until the end of July 2007 for a very cheap price.
Hi Bob – the homegain data (which is the true original creators of the data) is very old and topologically inaccurate. The first thing we did was correct all those types of mapping errors and we are rolling out 50 or so new cities this summer. And Maponics is committed to a quarterly update cycle. Any “fire sales” on the old data wouldn’t serve customers well.