According to research from comScore, consumers are increasingly looking for much more specific information from their search engine queries. The Internet is increasingly becoming the place of choice to search locally. And when you talk local, you're talking very specific.
With the focus of the comScore report on the online yellow pages, 
they found that around 68 million users did an Internet Yellow Page search in July of this year. That's almost 50% over the July of 2005 numbers.
While often pleaded with people here at thealphamarketer to get their local online marketing going, the numbers are again comfirming the enormous benefit and need to enter the market.
Why is it so important? There are still 50% of businesses in the U.S. that still don't even have a web presence. This gives you a competitive edge that they won't even know exists; if they're not online yet, they surely aren't looking to search for what their competitors are doing there.
One interesting side issue with all of this is that this is one area Yahoo (YHOO) is far in front of Google (GOOG). Yahoo's share of the local search market is 23.9%, while Google takes in only 12.5% of the local search market.
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