Planet Discover Local Search Gets Facelift

Planet Discover has been leading the way in providing local search for media companies and online publishers for nearly eight years. Over that time, the underlying software, Search Publisher, has been continually enhanced to provide more relevant search results and new features.

With the latest release of Local Search, Planet Discover has updated the user experience associated with its long standing integrated search results – results from multiple content sources on one page.

Focus on News

The updated integrated search results design continues to present content in a modular display, but additional emphasis has been placed on news results by reserving the center well of the page for local and archived news results. The Quick Links feature still remains in the new design to let visitors know what additional relevant content is available. The display order of additional content modules – local business information, events, photos and obituaries, for example – in the right rail is configurable. This allows Planet Discover partners to prominently display the content that is most important to their visitors.

New Search Features

In addition to addressing the design of the search results page, Planet Discover also added two new features to Local Search. Located in the top position of the left rail, Popular Searches is a new feature that surfaces the most popular search terms on a particular site. The popular search terms are auto-populated in the display by accessing the information in the Search Publisher search term report.

Another new feature, Local Tweets, is positioned in the right rail. This feature searches Twitter posts in a market's coverage area and posts Tweets based on the search term entered by a user. The Local Tweets module passes location information and a search term to the Twitter system and retrieves locally relevant posts. The Local Tweets module automatically updates every 30 seconds.