My best friend Matt bought a house and moved to Seattle last year. We talked on the phone quite a bit as he was getting settled and invariably we would end up talking about projects he was working on at the house, what restaurants he was going to, and where he was watching the Seahawks every Sunday.
When I finally came to visit him about 8 months after he moved in, Matt was a West Seattle expert. Unfortunately most of that expertise came through the expense of trial, trial and many errors. It's too bad he didn't know about Judy's Book. It may have saved him from what we now quietly refer to as "The Chicken Wing Incident." Let's just say, I'm glad I wasn't there.
Judy's Book is one of a new breed social local search engines. Judy's Book combines first person reviews of local businesses (both good and bad) with a unique TrustScoreSM that allows visitors to "evaluate the quality and trustworthiness of reviews written by real people on the site."
As more and more small businesses eschew traditional yellow page and newspaper ads in favor of local search, there will be great opportunities for them to take advantage of social local search engines like Yelp and Judy's Book - as long as they remember that word of mouth can bring both praise and pallor to their enterprise.
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