November 30, 2005
Using DNS to attach Websites to Local Search
A long time ago, when I was still at Citysearch, I had suggested that we somehow attain access to DNS records (either as a registrar or by partnering with someone who could provide us the data). This was long before Google had become a registrar.
Think about it…how would you attach a web site to a location? How would you know where this location is? Some sites will add address/geographic point meta data in the headers of their site (like the ones GeoURL uses) but those sites are few and far between. Some sites put the addresses somewhere on their site (front page, deep linked, or even may represent a chain of multiple locations). The challenge here would be to figure out how to find and parse this data since everyone puts it in different locations, addresses have multiple different formats and abbreviations, not to mention differences in international addresses, etc. Although it can be done, it wouldn’t be as accurate at looking up the DNS record that provides you with contacts (administrative, technical, billing, etc) with their phone numbers and addresses. This DNS data is structured data…you know the street field contains a street, the city field contains a city, and the phone number field contains a phone number.
So, if you’re asking why google chose to become a registrar a long time ago, it had nothing to do with being a consumer registration service. It had more to do with this:
Search on Google Local for Thomas Realty in Burbank, CA. Notice that the first item listed is Thomas Realty and the third is Thomas Realty Co.
Thomas Realty’s website is www.thomasrealtyco.com and is registered to “Thomas Realty Co” in Burbank at the corresponding address on the 3rd listing and with a corresponding phone number as well.
If you did a DNS lookup, you’d see this:
Registrant:
Thomas Realty Co.
245 E. Olive Ave
Burbank, CA 91502
USDomain Name: THOMASREALTYCO.COM
Administrative Contact:
Thomas Realty Co. Klick34@hotmail.com
245 E. Olive Ave
Burbank, CA 91502
US
818-845-7858 fax: 123 123 1234Technical Contact:
Network Solutions, LLC. customerservice@networksolutions.com
13200 Woodland Park Drive
Herndon, VA 20171-3025
US
1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620Record expires on 16-Nov-2006.
Record created on 16-Nov-2001.
Database last updated on 30-Nov-2005 20:24:16 EST.Domain servers in listed order:
NS26A.SBC-WEBHOSTING.COM 216.173.237.28
NS26B.SBC-WEBHOSTING.COM 216.173.237.47
So how did they identify this domain as belonging to the third record and why didn’t it match up to the first two?
Well, although all 3 have the same address, the DNS entry uses the exact business name as the 3rd listing (the “Co” on the end). How do I know they used the DNS entry and didn’t crawl the site to figure it out? Go to their URL: it contains but a title tag of “Thomas Realty Company,” keyword meta tags for just “Real Estate” and description meta tags for “Thomas Realty Company.” A big image says the name of the company in the middle along with an alt tag telling us, again, the name of the company. Nowhere is their any reference to any sort of address or phone number.
It’s quote possible the URL could have been culled elsewhere and attached to their local records (i.e. data providers which have either added them in by researching/finding them, some data providers pull out URLs found in phone books, some base data providers have them as well and confirm them through phone calls to the businesses).
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Not a good user experience. Oh well…it just launched and I’m sure it will get better (as will StepUp). This indicates a need for more frequent data pulls from ShopLocal into Google’s index. If you add the need for inventory awareness, this would only exacerbate the problem. What else is next? How about 
