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"Local search is one of those things you typically find on niche sites for events or real estate communities, and the mobile local search sector is growing steadily as GPS-enabled phones provide more relevancy and practical features for end users.  But with a new distributed search tool called Praized, any publisher can add local search and community reviews to their site.  \nThis is done by a Praized-powered search that lets your site visitors search for a particular keyword in a given location.  Results are ranked based on user feedback, which comes from the Praized community\u2014not necessarily your own.  That means you get to tap into a network that may be much larger than your own user base in order to provide relevant search results for a given local search query.  \n\nSo if Praized already has the community, where did all the data come from?  A working relationship with Yellow Pages and Localeze gave Praized a large database of local business profiles to start with, and it's been building up its community from there.  Users can vote a location up or down, and can add tags and comments so that the database is continually updated.  The providers of the initial data set (Yellow Pages and Localeze) receive user-generated tweaks to their existing database and publishers get user-supplemented information that can be passed onto end users.  \nIf one of these end users would in fact like to offer their own feedback towards the Praized results, they can easily join the Praized network and subsequently vote on individual search results.  Praized has also created a Facebook application in order to encourage users to interact directly with Praized in order to get the ball rolling on its user-modified search results.  One of its first launch partners for its distributed local search is MOCO, which is using Praized for its Local section of its Modern and Contemporary Art website.  \nIf I were a happenstance user of a participating website that installed Praized, I wouldn't be very encouraged to immediately sign up for Praized in order to interact with the search results, but I do like the idea of a distributed local search results.  Such data can be used for a number of things, including recommendations via another third party service, and I'm glad to see such community-driven content being used for a directly implemented option that others can use for their advantage.\nPraized Media"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/07/09/praized/>