Company adds Insider Pages' city guides and user reviews to complement its own Citysearch to bolster its standing in the growing local search arena Almost three months after a major overhaul of Ask.com’s local search engine, IAC/InterActiveCorp is again moving to improve its offerings in this popular search segment by acquiring Insider Pages, a city guide with hundreds of thousands of user reviews of local businesses.Insider Pages, founded in 2004 and with more than 600,000 merchant reviews and 2 million monthly unique users, will become part of Citysearch, a similar city guide that, like Ask.com, is owned by IAC.Between the two, Citysearch and Insider Pages have more than 1 million reviews as well as listings of local businesses in more than 500 categories and in every U.S. Zip Code, IAC announced Thursday. For now, Insider Pages will continue operating its own site, and Citysearch will incorporate Insider Pages material that it considers complementary to its guide, a Citysearch official said. A similar evaluation process regarding Insider Pages material will take place for Ask.com’s AskCity local search engine.In other words, neither Citysearch, which has about 13 million unique users per month, nor AskCity will automatically ingest all of Insider Pages’ content, said Dinesh Moorjani, Citysearch’s vice president of strategy and corporate development.After its overhaul in December, AskCity gained access to material from a variety of IAC-owned properties, including Citysearch, which has been around for a little more than 10 years. A challenge for IAC will be to strike the right balance between its multiple local search Web sites, which also includes ServiceMagic, a site where homeowners can find prescreened providers of services.“If they do this skillfully, they’ll benefit from having several properties. If not, they’ll have diluted and splintered their traffic,” said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.The opposite strategy would be to fold all those sites into a single online destination, but the segmentation strategy it’s pursuing could yield benefits by appealing to different kinds of users and giving it more places for ads, Sterling said. The Kelsey Group analyst Matt Booth said IAC will probably give Citysearch a significant number of reviews from Insider Pages, and vice versa, because otherwise the acquisition makes little sense. He would discourage IAC from going all out and consolidating its local search sites into one. “It’ll be interesting to see if Citysearch’s traffic increases as a result of having more reviews,” Booth said.Citysearch’s current traffic level has dropped from 14.8 million U.S. unique visitors in August of last year, when it was ranked 46th among the 50 most visited sites, according to comScore.Local search has become a highly popular search segment for both advertisers and end users. Typically, local search engines contain maps, offer driving directions, provide business listings and reviews, give traffic information, and display information about events. Advertising revenue in local search is expected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2005 to $13 billion in 2010, according to The Kelsey Group.In July of last year, 63 percent of U.S. Internet users, or about 109 million people at the time, conducted a local search, up 45 percent compared with July 2005, according to comScore Networks. Google led with 29.8 percent of queries, closely followed by Yahoo with 29.2 percent. Ask.com ranked in seventh place with 2.7 percent of queries.IAC didn’t disclose the financial details of the Insider Pages acquisition, which has already closed. This story was updated on March 1, 2007 DatabasesSoftware Development