I recently came across the relatively new Australian local search/directory Clickfind. They aim to be a “a hybrid between a search engine, a business directory, and a search engine optimisation (SEO) system.” There is certainly some competition in that space. The well established local search engines are truelocal.com.au and yellowpages.com.au, and right now it looks like Clickfind is having to play catch-up against the bigger rivals.

Local search suffers from a critical mass problem. Searchers won’t use it unless there are a lot of listings, and businesses are unlikely to keep using it unless the traffic is coming through. I’ve tried to understand both sides of the business, but I don’t think I’m a typical user on either side.

As a searcher, I’ll be honest: I don’t get it. If I’m looking for something, I search on Google. In the rare case I can’t find what I’m looking for I’ll try Truelocal (purely from name recognition). After testing Clickfind, it isn’t immediately obvious to me what benefits it offers searchers over the other local search engines. I searched for accountants in Manly and was presented with a choice between ‘products’, ’services’, and ‘companies’. I don’t get the distinction, and it required me to make an extra click for me to see the results. When I search for something I want the results right away, and for local search I want to see them on a map.

From the local business perspective Clickfind offers a slightly more enticing value proposition. If I owned a local business I would consider running a trial. A listing costs $20/mth. There are a lot of small businesses which aren’t very tech savvy so this may be a good deal for them as a first entry into the online world. Truelocal, by comparison, offers free listings. The free listings are very limited and to get any real information listed it starts at about $60/month.

Perhaps the business model of Clickfind is based around selling to small low-tech businesses that may not want to consider other advertising sources such as Google. A quick estimate puts the number of advertisers on Clickfind at about 4000. If they are getting $20/mth from each that’s not bad for a company with only a few employees.

I think Clickfind will face a hard uphill battle against the established players. While they will probably carve out a nice profitable business I can’t see much more than that. On the other hand, their database of small businesses is quite valuable. Perhaps a large media company wanted to compete with News and their truelocal property will try to get into the local search space via the acquisition of Clickfind.