Some of you may be too young to remember, but the physical Yellow Pages was one of the main ways you could find local businesses. Those meaty books were a mainstay and saw frequent usage in many many households around the world. But since the late 90s and early part of the 2000s, for good measure, the books have been disappearing. Google had a big part to play in that.

Google is the de facto search engine of choice. But there was space for better discovery of local services. So Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, Yelp and others were born.

Going beyond discovery

To start, as an example, let’s take a look at all of Yelp’s local services categories in San Francisco:

Under each of these categories, you’ll find hundreds if not thousands of local busin...