Switzerland's local search engine.

The local.ch Phonebook, Yellow Pages and the Event Search are now available on TV!

With the new Internet compliant Philips Net TV, you can search for private addresses, businesses and local events via the local.ch Phonebook, YellowPages and Event Search.

Features:

We have adapted the functionality of our Phonebook, YellowPages and Event Search, so that the navigation is possible via a standard TV remote control. The maps, which display the search results, work particularly well on a big TV screen.

Design:

The new local.ch service via the TV appears on a black background. This is unusual for local.ch. We have chosen softer colors, which make the usage of the site equally good in a darkened, comfortable tv-light setting.

We are happy to provide our users an additional channel for using local.ch as well as the mobile and computer web.

Enjoy!

From today, local.ch Leisure has the most extensive Event Search in Switzerland for the whole of the Canton of Ticino. Thanks to our partners www.ticino.ch and www.tio.ch, ALL tourist and local events can now be quickly and easily found on local.ch under ‘Leisure’.

Search and you will find
If, for example, you look for ‘Concert’ in ‘Bellinzona’, you will find jazz trios, Flori Musicali di Bellinzona or an appearance of the Flamingo Band. In this way, you can find interesting, cultural and, above all, local events!

Opening hours and location maps
Search local.ch for the door opening times or the location on the map of an event that you already know about.

Restaurants and bars
You can, of course, also find the nearest food outlet on Leisure by searching for ‘Pizzeria’ in ‘Locarno’.

Events on your mobile phone
All events can also be searched in your mobile phone using ‘mobile.guide.local.ch’, which is very practical when you’re traveling! Simply save this link as a Bookmark in the browser on your mobile phone.

We wish you lots of fun in searching and finding events in Ticino!

and

A lunch meeting with work colleagues, a cinema evening with friends, a date for a family gathering: Doodle makes finding appointments easier.

As soon as the appointment has been made, wouldn’t it be useful to know WHERE the event is taking place and how to get there?

This is where we come in:
We offer the possibility to add the address to the Doodle, so that all participants can see where the event is taking place. Public transport is selectable on a map.

Today the address for example ‘Thurgauerstrasse 40, Zürich’ can be added to the Doodle. More functionalities will be added soon.

Try it out and give us feedback on info@local.ch.

Go to doodle.com.

Win Paleo Festival Tickets with local.ch!
Find openairs, local events and the current cinema program for your area in the local.ch Leisure section. Search for a band of your choice across the whole of Switzerland to see where they’re playing!

How to win Paleo Festival tickets:
See Moby, Amy MacDonald, SnowPatrol, NTM and Ska-P at the Paleo Festival 2009! We have tickets for you to win!

Write to us either by commenting on the blog right here, or by sending us an e-mail to info@local.ch and tell us “What do you wish we had on the local.ch Leisure section?”.

Send us your ideas by the 1st of July!

Have you seen ‘local’? Flickr it!

At local.ch we like to share our historic moments with everyone. Our glorious moments of fame and fortune, our crazy events and company outings as well as of course snippits from our daily work life, which is everything other than boring.

You can see all fotos related to local.ch right here in the local flickr group.

Flickr it.

Every time we spot the word ‘local’ written somewhere we flickr it. For example the snow local or the local heroes. So, if you come across any ‘local’s in your travels, send them in to us at: info@local.ch.

Win!

The most original ‘local’ foto sent in to us before the 1st of April 2009 wins a Samsung digital foto frame! Please provide your postal address with the e-mail with your fotos!

For the further development of the innovative and Award winning local.ch team we are looking for new talents:

Junior Software Engineer
The Junior Software Engineer is part of the platform team, which runs the daily operation. We are looking for a person, who is the interface between clients, users and our platform (Job Description, pdf, in German)

Senior Software Engineer
The Senior Software Engineer will work together with the engineering team on the further development of the platform. This includes conceptual work, technical implementation and project management (Job Description, pdf, in German)

Senior Software Engineer with Focus on Information Retrieval (Lucene Framework)
Our search engine is built around the Lucene Framework. We would like to complement our search team with someone who has a solid theoretical background on information retrieval, particularly with an ability to implement Lucene based solutions. (Job Description, pdf, in German)

About us:
local.ch Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Swisscom Directories and was founded in November 2005 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of PubliGroupe-Division PubliDirect. local.ch is part of the joint venture between PubliDirect and Swisscom Directories Ltd., who are jointly responsible for the marketing of printed and electronic directories (local and regional telephone directories and Yellow Pages®).

The main goal of local.ch is - as the name implies - to provide the best local search in Switzerland. Join a great team and help build a leading edge public website. The team at local.ch is multinational and multilingual.

More information
More details in the job descriptions and of course by contacting us at marc [dot] isler [at] local.ch.

We've been lazy recently with blog posts. ;-( We've not been lazy improving local.ch ;-)

Here a round-up of some exciting new things on local.ch

• Our all improved city pages or how we refer to them: location pages (Why we call them location pages? A) why not, b) because there are also smaller communities out there not qualifying as cities.). Check them out: Local news tailored to your community, integration of local car classifieds and market classifieds, improved weather including a five day forecast and local webcams telling you whether the forecast matches reality, plus a local map, linking to our all new map slot.

• Talking of maps. We got a new map slot: map.local.ch. The slot label will follow shortly. However you can do already quite a number of things: Type in any address and you will be shown its precise location on the map. You also can do routing, say how to get from Zollikon to Adelboden. And once there you can do a near search, say look for a bar to refresh yourself within 500m of the city center.

• We also listened to your feedback since we merged yellowpages.ch, whitepages.ch and local.ch. We got a number of complaints about: missing world directories page, about too small characters on the advanced search page, better visibility of the detail pages on the result list, issues with vCards, a version of local.ch without a map (sic!), a better print format of our result list. Consider the issues solved!
• A number of improvements are invisible to your, dear users. We improved the ad delivery performance, the query performance, a number of improvements in the administration part of our platform.
• And last but not least: We gave our homepage a bit of love.

More to come, but for the moment enjoy!

Since this week you actually can book your hotel room directly on local.ch. Better say: You can initiate your booking on local.ch, as we are no hotel booking engine but a local information aggregator (getting better all the time on that one).

Once you found your hotel you simply click on the link marked in the picture below. You will be taken to the STC Switzerland Centre site with your reservation form already pre-filled. You just need to complete the form to make your reservation. So simple*!

* Condition to high credit card spending limit, depending on the hotel chosen and availability of the suite chosen.

Again some time since the last post on new items on local.ch. Despite EM and summer holidays we've been busy adding new features.

Most importantly we released a first version of a subject search. On our yellow page slot your find results ranked according to perceived usefulness as opposed to a more alphabetical based result list on the phone book slot. Example:

• Taxi in Zürich on the phone book slot
• Taxi in Zürich on the yellow page slot

Sure, this a first version and more improvements are down the development pipeline.

The "city page" got an update. That is the page you see if you only search in the "where" field or type "local.ch/YourFavoriteTown" in the address bar of your browser.

We now show local news aggregated from various publishes. We analyse the news articles for locations - and filter them for you - so you see what headlines your town does. Examples:

• www.local.ch/Sissach
• www.local.ch/Horgen

A few more things also got released over the last weeks

• A little help of us for local search where you are. Say on the St.Galler Tagblatt, 1818, Stadtanzeiger Winterthur
• Map improvements: POIs on all zoom levels
• New ads: Banner ads, animated corners, full IAB ads
• And lot's of internal improvements - not visible though for you, our users, but helpful still to provide better and quicker results

While PHP-developing it sometimes is just too tedious to do those 'add a echo here and there, then reload and search the echoed strings on the screen'-loops. So I searched for a debugger for my favourite editor emacs. After a lengthy install procedure I finally got it running: With geben on emacs you can debug PHP (step through and evaluate expressions)