Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Some people believe that local search is a space that Google hasn’t yet conquered. I haven’t found that to be the case in our local area as Google occupies like 98% of my daily searches, including local businesses. There is, however, something to the notion that nobody knows local businesses better than the people in the area.

This is where iBegin Source steps in offering yellow pages for businesses around the United States that anybody can update using a wiki-style concept. iBegin source offers a free download license for non-commercial use. Businesses can license a state for $1,000 or the entire US for $40,000. As of this writing iBegin claims to have 10,820,479 total business listings.

iBegin downloadable data
The data is pipe (|) delimited and includes the following fields for non-commercial (free): ID, Name, Street Address, City, Zip, Fax, Category, Website URL, Hours, Time Added (timestamp), Time Last Updated (timestamp)

Those who purchase the commercial license get the following additional fields: Phone, Geocoding (latitude and longitude) and Major Intersection.

Having the fax but not the business phone number for personal use isn’t very useful but fortunately you can search from the iBegin Source website and find the phone numbers of local businesses.

Don’t see a business you know is there? Registered users can suggest updates to the system either through the website or using the automated trackback system. The only fields required to become a registered user are username, password and email address.

Design and interaction
Some of the pages use inline windows that appear and the background fades like the definition for geocoding shown below:

I’m sure this was done for stylistic reasons as the site design otherwise is bland. I happen to like bland though when it comes to getting to raw data. The site is primarily text-based and I encountered no third party advertising. There is a button to click for online support but nobody was available (it’s a Saturday, not surprised) to talk to about the site/service.

Accuracy of data
Our offline business established in town since 1996 was listed under the corporate name but the fax number was about three years outdated. It showed being added on January 23, 2007, so whatever source used was wrong. The street address number was completely wrong — off by one number — we moved from there a year ago to our present location. I decided to attempt to fix/update the data.

Through the web form I edited the wrong information and corrected and then his submit and was treated to a PHP header error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent [server/file details redacted]

By revisiting the page all my changes took, but a keyword search still would not reveal the business either before the change or after. Compare this to Google and I put in our business name which also had our address a year ago with all other information correct. Both iBegin and Google had the right phone number (which has never changed), so that’s positive. Still, I don’t know why our business wasn’t turning up in the search using the zip code.

I tried a couple other searches for local businesses. Data accuracy overall was on par with other business data services I’ve seen, including the phone book, which isn’t that good. I didn’t fix any other data.

Other features
Some attractive iBegin feature for developers: every listing in hCard microformat and has location saved in KML, the aforementioned geocode data which would be handy for mapping mashups and everything is section 508 accessbility friendly using HiSoftware’s Cynthia Says.

Summary and grade
The problem I see with community updated data sources is what’s to stop competitors, vandals and spammers from altering data? It was easy to change our business information, too easy. And I didn’t even get into using the automated system. How do they know the address I put in was accurate? It’s relying on Wiki style monitoring and updates and my experience with public wikis is they only work if you have enough people monitoring the changes and locking out abuse.

Like any directory service, it’s only as good as the accuracy and reliability of the data. I’m not convinced iBegin Source will do any worse — or any better — than competing services that poll businesses to gather the data (like the phone company and local yellow pages).

Pricing? As a small business owner $1,000 for the entire state seems reasonably priced if you market to the entire state, however our primary marketing area is the greater Puget Sound area, so we’d need a much smaller subset than the entire state.

Unlike the Wikipedia iBegin Source is not a non-profit venture and they may find it difficult to get enough people involved to help maintain the integrity of the database. On the plus side the forms and scripts don’t have the annoying Wiki markup. Overall, not something I’d use for personal or business use, but others might find this useful in their local areas. Grade: C-

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