Foursquare Launches New Local Search Focused Home Page

Well, that didn’t take long: foursquare just turned its home page into the ultimate local search tool. The change which is rolling out today is taking place not even a week after Dennis Crowley, the founder & CEO of foursquare, announced at the PandoMonthly NYC event that foursquare is looking to monetize the service using a Google AdWords type approach for local search that is focused exclusively on mobile.

The new home page, which can be seen below, appears for all users who are not logged into the site on the desktop. You can easily search for things to do or eat in your neighborhood or some place you plan to visit. The data used for recommendations includes check-ins, lists, likes, dislikes, tips and other information which then creates a numerical score for each business or listing and ranks them accordingly.

Additionally, because the recommendations displayed are based on aggregated foursquare data, the corresponding rankings make the site useful to anyone. This means you don’t need to have invested a lot of time in using the service for its local search to be useful to you. Of course, if you login and perform a local search, then the recommendations are also modified based on your friends feedback and your own data.

While the results are listed in order by score, non-members can also filter by venues that have foursquare specials. If you login with your foursquare account, you will also have access to other filters such as the ability to show you places you haven’t been to, places you have been to, and places your friends have been to.

All of this is just the beginning for foursquare as the company begins to roll out more features that display just how useful all of that data it has collected over the past few years actually is. While the monetization aspect hasn’t been released quite yet, I don’t think it’s too far off.