Yokel.com - Search For Products From Local Stores
Yokel.com is a shopping search engine and price comparison site that lets you find products found in local stores.
While the search engine seems to focus on the major big-box type stores, it does include a few mom-and-pop sites and stores in the area… but, the lack of truly local stores might be a result of my location (Duluth, MN) than anything else. It would be interesting to give it a try in some of the more larger metropolitan areas.
The Results
Most of my search test search queries came back with pretty good results. However, the search engine appears to be a keyword based application rather than any type of semantic results.
Case in point is a search I did for “strollers”. The search engine returned products and stores that included the term “strollers” in it’s title. However, the term can have multiple meanings, but this can easily be circumvented by adding additional search terms.
The Design
The interface of the search results is pretty standard… a set of search results on the left, refining terms on the right, and advertising on the bottom.
The only thing that could be considered a little distracting is the amount of advertising on the bottom and the placement of the paging links. In order to see the next page you essentially have two options: Scroll all the way down past the advertising or scroll back up to the top of the results to get to the next page.
Once you perform a keyword search on Yokel, the site returns listings grouped by store including the distance from your current location in Miles (sorry metric users!)
In some cases, the results will also include a picture of the item and it’s associated price.
In addition to the search terms, Yokel also provides you with the ability to narrow you search terms based price, brand, and store category to name a few. This is a pretty standard feature among shopping search engines and can be very useful when searching for a product.
Conclusion
So, in closing… Yokel.com is a very basic, but well designed shopping search engine with a great approach. I think with today’s current and seemingly ever increasing gas prices, localized search engines such as this will become a key part of people’s shopping rituals.
