Yesterday’s post on the Kelsy Group blog highlights the fact that people no longer want to search through categories to find businesses, they want to search by service or product or other “keywords”. They want to use “natural search”.

This is where Bizwiki is leading the way in local search. Bizwiki provides the standard categorisation for anyone wishing to search that way, however the majority of our users use the free form search box. By building a unique synonym set and merging it with our own proprietary algorithm Bizwiki is able to provide relevant local results in seconds.

Here are just a few examples of the relevant results Bizwiki’s NaturalSearch functionality provides:

Looking for a curry house in Birmingham?

Has your Selby office run out of printer ink?

Do you need help selling your Essex based business?

Want to know where the all night petrol stations in Warwick are?

Going on holiday from Swansea and need travel money?

NaturalSearch is the way forward. Why limit users to selecting a category? Why confine them to some archaic taxonomy?

Bizwiki’s NaturalSearch technology is still in the beginning stages. If you think it’s good now just wait til you see what we have in store!

This will be old news to some of our most frequent users, but with the final elements integrated we are very happy to announce that Bizwiki is now the power behind the extremely popular Accessplace Business Directory.

Anyone following the Bizwiki Blog will have read our announcement on July 25th that we now power the TownPages.com local information website.

‘One more reason to add your business to Bizwiki – TownPages’

This has now been heavily underlined by the powering of Accessplace, which Hitwise list alongside such respected sites as Google Maps, Yell.com, BT and Local.co.uk in the top 10 of the UK’s Local Search sites.

See the top 10 table here:

What this means to our users is that by adding your business or increasing the amount of information available about it on Bizwiki, you will get exposure not only to our users but to the very many people who use Townpages for local search and the vast audience of Accessplace Business Directory.

Additional information including photographs is provided to all three sites by Local Data Company, but the only way to get a new company listed is to add it right here.

The good news is its completely free to do so. That’s the wiki difference.

An article for the British newspaper the Telegraph highlights the importance of Internet Directory sites like Bizwiki for businesses forced to save marketing budgets in adverse economic conditions.

‘Blog on and use web pages to drive up sales opportunities

By Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor

Given the current economic slowdown and that marketing is often the first expense to be cut when firms face a financial pinch, here is a snapshot of some free services being used by firms on the internet.

Internet directories

Traditional directories have moved online, like Yell.com. New free sites feature highly on natural searches: www.Brownbook.net and www.Bizwiki.co.uk are fast-growing business directories with self-edited listings and customer reviews.’

At Bizwiki, we whole-heartedly agree with his assessment. More and more commerce is moving online, and with all the talk of possible recession and belt-tightening in the wider economy, it makes more sense than ever to take full advantage of resources that are available online for businesses -particularly sites like Bizwiki that list companies for no charge at all.

The first step is to make sure your company is listed -simply use the search form at the top of the page. If it isn’t, you can add it for free in a few simple steps. If it is listed, now would be a good time to add more information and details.

Bizwiki gets a wide variety of users from other businesses owners and managers to researchers to competitors to local councils to suppliers – and perhaps even your next customer.

Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/12/ybmedia112.xml