SkypeFind Brussels

This afternoon i played around with SkypeFind. Still way for improvement …

Believe me or not, there are 25 restaurants listed in Brussels.

Do the test yourself: search “What: restaurant – Where: Brussels – Find listings in: Belgium”.

OOPS! Only 9 listed!

Do the same search but replace Brussels with Brussel or Bruxelles, here are the results:

• restaurant - Brussels: 9 found
• restaurant - Brussel: 11 found
• restaurant - Bruxelles: 14 found

The second search listed all the same, and two more.
The third search listed 14 different ones. So, 11 + 14 = 25 and i am not a liar ;-)

How come? In Dutch we say Brussel, in French we say Bruxelles, and in English, Brussels. Most people add a listing with the name of the city in one language, and when you make a search it only lists those locations with the exact spelling!

How to circumvent it? I listed my own business, and did put the location like this:

• City: Gent - Ghent – Gand
• Area: Oostakker (this is a suburb of Ghent)

And yes, now when i search for it, whatever of the above names i use as a search criterion (including the “area”) it finds it!

I have a car, therefore if i want to find a restaurant in my province (field “Region” in the SkypeFind database), and i put East Flanders as search location, it finds nothing. If i leave the city location blank it finds all the restaurants in Belgium, but some are really too far.

While registering my business, i hoped to find a field to put my Skype account name. NO WAY! Skype to Skype calls will always be free, but no way to put a Skype ID, business is business! Call your favourite businesses with SkypeOut! So, is Skype a TELCO?

Then i wondered if i could edit the listing of somebody else. Ooh yes! I saw that restaurant Ter Toren was listed in the city “Oostakker”. This is wrong, it should be Gent, so i changed it, and did put (like for my own business) Gent – Ghent – Gand. I could even add some more keywords. Could I have added “sex”, or “never hallal food” or something like that? I could even change the name of the business! What if somebody does that with the name of my business?

Therefore, some improvement work to do for Skype:

1. Make the search “language independent” by making a database of postcodes linked to a name (for instance).
2. Let the user refine the geographical zone he wants to search in
3. Have a field for the Skype ID of the business
4. Let Business Owner have exclusive rights on some fields (name, telephone number, etc.) or give them at least the possibility to “take control over it”, but I guess Skype marketers already thought about it: perhaps another way to make money in the future?
5. Have an input for the geographical coordinates of the location, and link this with some route planner or Google Earth.

Yes, still work to do for Skype!