Grayboxx is a secretive Saratoga, Calif. startup that plans to launch later this year to help you search for popular local businesses, from restaurants or dry cleaners.
We’d normally yawn at such a company, because a dozen other companies are more or less directly competing in the area. But we got a sneak peak, and we were impressed with its very different way of collecting data to determine business popularity. The data includes where people make purchases and what businesses they recommend to each other. (Apologies for being vague, but the company is keeping its exact method under wraps. )
What Grayboxx does show is that there’s a lot of innovation left to uncover in search. Unlike Yelp, Yahoo Local, Google and other local review sites (including Google’s new local initiative), Grayboxx relies on its own data (again, confidential for now) instead of using page rank or relying on local user generated content. In a demo provided to us by founder Bob Chandra, we tested Grayboxx with random searches based on our local knowledge of which stores in Palo Alto were good or not.
When somebody searches for, say, Asian fusion restaurants in Palo Alto — of which there are many — Grayboxx points to the businesses its data suggests are the most popular. The results were on point for Palo Alto businesses — Tamarine for Asian fusion food, for example. Grayboxx also helped us find a new dry cleaners.
The market for local information online is wide open. For example, people still prefer newspapers to local search engines for getting local shopping information, according to the Kelsey Group last year.
As SearchEngineLand points out, nobody can even agree on the size of the local online advertising market in the next five years: Research groups are estimating anywhere from $5 billion to $30 billion in the US. What these researchers do agree on is strong overall growth in the market — with no clear winners as of yet.
Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the Google founders while they were still students, has joined the company’s board, along with a number of other search, data-collection and local advertising veterans.
Grayboxx has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sierra Ventures.
Tags: co:grayboxx, inv:Sierra-Ventures, people:bob-chandra6 Comments
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N said:
Good luck with this one. There’s been so much ‘local’ talk lately but to my mind no real progression from YP over the web. Not sure about the name grayboxx though. people buy brands right?
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JTW said:
when I search for GreyBoxx I get a bunch of naked old ladies
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A. Smith said:
There is a tremendous amount of hype over local search. There is also a pervasive assumption that people always want to “search” for information, even local information.
Eric, you made no mention of Ask which has a more comprehensive local search engine given the integration with several IAC properties. I mention Ask as they are losing search market share. Granted, their current ad campaign is horrendous, but more importantly, despite all the forecasts to the contrary, Ask is not seeing any growth in its’ local search efforts around AskCity.com.
There is tremendous competition, lots of new gee whiz technologies, and a clear preference for newspapers in this area. I hope the best for GrayBoxx, but I think they are another gee whiz technology looking for a problem to solve.
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Eric Eldon said:
jtw: search for “grayboxx,” instead :)
A. Smith: Yes, Ask is another one. And yes, there’s hype around local search. Still, based on what I saw of Grayboxx’s approach, I think they’re doing something different that could work well.
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Neal said:
Grayboxx is taking on the problem of local “word of mouth” from a very interesting direction. I have played around with their product and found the results to be quite good and in alignment with what I might have expected. Bob and team will no doubt impact the local search space.
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Evan said:
I’ll hold off on judging Grayboxx’s local search capabilities until I have the opportunity to try it myself. But I am encouraged by Eric’s testimonial, and by the fact that Rajeev Motwani is on Grayboxx’s advisory board. What with Rajeev’s brains and experience, I can’t see him jumping on board a fly-by-night company. Maybe Grayboxx is on to something…
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