Tis the season…

UMI’s own Ian White will participate on a panel Getting Found in Local Search & Maps at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto show, June 16-18.

We’ve been working on it for quite some time, and today are thrilled to announce the first public release of our GeoMods geotargeting platform. In the past my master has written and spoken about the perils of IP-based geotargeting for local search.

Here’s the fact: for local targeting, where granularity matters (and some will argue it doesn’t yet matter), resolving an IP address to a location doesn’t work. The UMI solution doesn’t claim to be a technical solution, but rather aggregates large sets of geographic keywords around existing search behavior. It’s a mouthful to explain, but stand by for more on that front.