Urban Mapping’s Ian White will participate on a panel, Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search, at the annual SES Chicago Conference & Expo at the Chicago Hilton, December 3-7.

UMI staff spent some time sifting through the leaked AOL search data and came up with some interesting findings….

We ran our database of neighborhood names through the AOL data and found that fully 9% of queries reference informal space–things like soho, downtown, financial district, etc. We discount this number by 1/3 to take user intent into account (clearly the search “Northwest Airlines” has no local intent).

So we end up with 6% of all search queries using some kind of informal (assuming the sample is somewhat representative). This is an astounding number. In the context of local search, this is something that nobody is capturing–the queries are going unfilled or returning a proximate match based on keywords, despite the clear geographic nature of the search.