Nelso partners with Volny.cz on local search

Nelso has partnered with one of the Czech Republic's largest portals, Volny.cz, to provide local search listings for restaurants and bars in Prague to its one million monthly visitors. Currently, the partnership is limited to a tab on their home page search box, which takes users to a Volny-branded version of Nelso.

This is Nelso's first partnership deal, and we'll be closely monitoring the quantity (and quality) of traffic we get from Volny. We'll update this blog in a few months with the results of this "experiment".

Nelso now supports OpenID on all its sites

Nelso has implemented OpenID as an alternative to logging in using a Nelso account.

What this means in practice is that you can now log in to Nelso to add a business with your Google Gmail account, your Yahoo! account, or any other OpenID-enabled account you may have on the web. In the Czech Republic, Seznam has enabled OpenID on all its accounts, so if you have a Seznam account, you can log in to Nelso with that username and password and you'll never need to remember a different password for Nelso.

To make OpenID even easier to use, we've added clickable links to log in using accounts on major portals, so you don't have to remember the endpoint URL for your OpenID provider (didn't understand that? That's exactly why we've added these clickable links).

Check out the new Nelso login page to see how logging in to Nelso is now much easier than it was before.

Top categories on Nelso.cz for December 2008

The top categories for user searches on Nelso.cz for the month of December 2008 were:

1. Plavecké bazény (swimming pools)
   This was a popular search during the summer, but not sure why it'd be so popular in December. Perhaps people are already sick of winter and want to go swimming rather than do a winter sport.
2. Pošty (post offices)
   Always a popular search. For some reason, on Seznam.cz we rank above the actual Czech post office when searching for post offices in Prague. The Czech Post might want to do a little SEO, at least to rank for their own name.
3. Kostely (churches)
   This is a new one. I don't think we've ever had so much traffic for this category before. The days in December with the most searches for "church" on Nelso.cz? December 25th and December 31st, of course.
4. Zubní lékaři (dentists)
   No surprises here. Everyone has to go to the dentist.
5. Mexické restaurace (Mexican restaurants)
   I don't normally think of Czechs as big fans of Mexican food, but this may just be the effect of our SEO efforts in this area.
6. Papírnictví (paper and stationery stores)
7. Sushi
8. Indické restaurace (Indian restaurants)
   Wow, the Czechs are getting adventurous. Mexican food, Sushi, and Indian food all in the top 10? What happened to the beloved Czech "knedlíky" (dumplings)?
9. Tetovací Studia & Body Piercing (tattoos and body piercing)
   I'm now used to the idea of tattoos being a top 10 category, but when I started Nelso a year ago I would never have guessed this category would be so popular.
10. Čínské restaurace (Chinese restaurants)
    Again, so surprises here. Prague is full of Chinese restaurants, and the Czechs love Chinese food.

What's interesting about this list is that it is not in line with the popular perception of Nelso as a restaurant and bar guide. The top four categories are all unrelated to food and drink, and only four of the top 10 are related to restaurants (none of the top ten are related to drinking alcohol - you have to go down to our #16 category, hospody (pubs) to find that). Many local sites concentrate too heavily on restaurants and entertainment, when there is a lot of traffic out there for more "mundane" categories like dentists and office supplies.

Nelso in Japanese

Still working the bugs out, but we've launched a version of Nelso in Japanese at Nelso.jp. A lot of Japanese tourists come to プラハ (Prague), so we're hopeful that it'll generate some traffic for the Nelso network.

Why we take pictures

We're often asked why Nelso sends photographers into the street to photograph businesses, rather than licensing a database of business listings from a company like Localeze, or collecting user-generated content to fill out our database of listings as Google Maps does.

Both of those strategies (licensing a database of business listings and collecting user-generated listings) are valid approaches, and Nelso will take advantage of both of these sources of business listings in the future. However, we still believe strongly in the value of collecting our own business data from staff in the field equipped with GPS-enabled cameras.

• Many databases of business listings are updated only infrequently, and are very slow to remove closed businesses from that database.
• Most databases of business listings have incomplete, and even worse, incorrect data.

A good recent example of data that cannot be sourced any other way than through sending out photographers is the McDonald's in the center of Bratislava, Slovakia. We photographed the door of this business, as we usually do, and recorded the hours of operation in our system.

When checking these hours against the hours on the official McDonald's of Slovakia site, we found the following:



If you click on the above image, you can see that even McDonald's official site doesn't have the correct hours for this location. It is actually quite common for us to find errors in a business' own website. Usually, a business puts up a site, and never looks at it ever again, or only infrequently. Thus, even getting business details from a business itself would not result in accurate data. Only collecting the data ourselves will allow us to provide quality data for our users.

The Long Tail - Car Dealers in Iceland (California)

We recently noticed a large increase in searches on Nelso for a car dealer in California, with most of these searches coming from Danish users. The car dealer in question is Island Auto Sales in Alameda, California.

Why would Danish users be so interested in this one particular car dealer in northern California? Well, "Island" in Danish means "Iceland", and since the Icelandic economy has melted down, Danish users must think that cars are cheap in Iceland.

Another example of the very long tail searches generated by our localization into 10+ languages.

12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile. Easy, no?

A search for cafes in Prague on Nelso.cz


A search for cafes in Prague on Nelso.com

We're always looking to perfect the localization on the Nelso sites, and to that end we've made a small tweak to the way we display distances on the Nelso sites (see above). If you are using Nelso.com, which is aimed at U.S. users, you'll see distances displayed in feet and miles rather than meters and kilometers. This is useful because despite the spread of the metric system throughout the world, most Americans don't have a good feel for metric measures of distance.

Headed to BarCamp Copenhagen

I'm headed to BarCamp Copenhagen at the end of this week, and will be in Copenhagen on Saturday, November 22 and Sunday, November 23. I'm staying at the Adina Apartment Hotel on Amerika Plads (America Square - how appropriate). I've stayed at the Adina in Berlin, and I'm hoping the one in Copenhagen will be as nice as the one in Germany's capital.

I may or may not give a presentation at this BarCamp. I didn't present at BarCamp Berlin last month, and sorta regretted not taking that opportunity.

If you'll be in Copenhagen on these dates, leave a comment below and maybe we can meet up.

Our most popular U.S. business listing is a typo

Looking through the Google Analytics stats for our English-language site, I was surprised to find that the most visited U.S. business listing on Nelso is a small bed and breakfast in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California called Svendsgaard's Inn. I found this surprising because it is very hard to rank for hotel (or any accommodation) keywords on Google if the search is in English. These listings are dominated by large established sites like TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, and Expedia, and we don't put any effort into trying to rank for such competitive terms.

So I went to Google and searched using the keywords that brought people to the Nelso site for this business listing, and there we were, three of the top ten results for this little inn in northern California (Google Map).

Why would we rank for this particular place? It took me a few seconds, but I quickly realized that it was common for users to search for "Svengaard's Inn", rather than the correct spelling of "Svendsgaard's Inn", and that this same misspelling was in our database.

Now, I've heard of people doing this - putting misspellings and common typos on a web page just to attract typo traffic from Google - but we've never tried that ourselves. This little accidental experiment, however, shows that there might be something in this. I wonder how many typos are entered into Google by non-Czech speakers when searching for businesses in Prague. Probably quite a few, as the Czech language is very challenging for a non-native speaker.

Välkommen till Sverige

Although the current version is just a draft, and the translation still needs work, we have launched a version of Nelso in Swedish at Nelso.se. Later this month (November 2008) we'll start photography for Malmö (across the bridge from Copenhagen), and then early next year we'll start photographing Stockholm in earnest.