VentureBeat

As the dot-com crash proved, the Internet doesn’t spell the end of the brick-and-mortar store. While shopping startups like Boo.com and Webvan went belly-up, the traditional mall continued to thrive, relatively untouched by the web phenomenon.

Getting data about the local mall on to the web is the point of NearbyNow, a search engine that tells us it has just raised a fresh $11.75 million round from Norwest Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company, now in its second year of existence, has gone from a single mall in its database in late 2006 to 202 malls today, and says it’s within range of half the population of the United States.

Instead of just searching within a geographical area, though, NearbyNow asks users to pick a specific mall. They then need to enter a search term, like “jeans”, with results showing for all the stores in the mall. The results can be narrowed by categories like “men’s apparel” or limited to specific stores.

While I was checking out NearbyNow, I decided to test out the company’s claim that it can tell you whether an item is available in a store within 10 minutes. It’s a simple process — just enter your desired size, color and quantity and either an email address or a mobile phone number.

True enough, I got a reply within about eight minutes on my first request. Unfortunately, the item I wanted wasn’t in stock, but it did offer a link to buy it online. A second request reported that there would be a delay before the store could check on the item, which ended up taking about 15 minutes more before I was told that item was also out of stock. Two failures would be enough to wear out the patience of many searchers — there’s some hard work to be done in keeping the site up to date with what’s actually in stores.

One the other hand, the engine provides a good way to look through the sorts of styles different stores carry. As readers pointed out in our first story about NearbyNow, the company’s challenge isn’t developing a useful product, but rather distinguishing itself amid the noise of competitors like Krillion and ShopLocal. None have yet captured the market.

NearbyNow is based in Los Altos, Calif. The company has raised $19.25 million to date, including a first round of capital from DFJ.

More on shopping malls….

NearbyNow is a search engine specifically for your local shopping mall — and we hear it’s getting strong interest from venture capitalists.

It’s about to finish raising another $5 million. The company raised $2.5 million last year, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and including Draper Richards.

On its face, this may seem like just another wannabe search engine. However, there’s increasing realization that many people like to search online to do price comparisons, but prefer to shop offline so they can touch and feel a product — especially for higher-priced items. We recently wrote about Krillion, which lets you search local stores for consumer appliances. Both sites are getting inventory information straight from the local retailers, and so their info is much richer than others sites, such as ShopLocal.

NearbyNow lets people search online through the entire inventory of their local shopping malls. So shoppers at home can see what is new, and what is on sale. They can search by category, but also search for things like coupons, or by stores. A site is created for each shopping mall (see screenshot below). Moreover, the company is offering search stations within the malls. Like in the Reactrix case, we’ve heard the company has signed deals with several top mall owners. (Our source is outside of the company).

Several Silicon Valley malls are among those already live.

Here’s more information on the type of information the site provides to customers, retailers and advertisers. Nothing can be bought online; it is about pushing people into the stores.