For local search, I almost always use google maps instead. Maps search isn't perfect, but it beats web search hands down.
Some tricks I've used in the past include local church bulletins (most parishes have some sort of a website and a weekly bulletin with advertising on the back), or local sport team sponsors, or local bars.
For towing, you can also try calling a local dealership or auto repair.
This is certainly a problem with the locksmith companies, but I think there's also a Maps problem, too: Google enables this kind of commerce, especially businesses that apparently have a physical location but explicitly stated on the phone that I can't stop by there. It reminded me of all of the thousands of Delaware corps housed in a single building.
If Google made it so that you're only listed on the map if you actually have a physical commerce location, that would help a lot -- at least for those kinds of businesses that need it. Towing companies and the like may be an exception?
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Backrub paper
The type of people get into locksmithing are like those who do computer security for fun - they like to figure out how things work and how they can be broken. Which means that every locksmith wants to figure out how to game the system. And the first thing that they all figured out is that people tend to select whatever locksmith is closest. So they all went and pretended to be in a million places around the neighborhood in hopes that THEY would get selected.
That was the case a decade ago. And it was a nightmare. Glancing at a locksmith search now, Google somehow cleaned that up a lot. But it doesn't surprise me that whoever is on top now is someone who figured out how to game the current system.
I had the same thing happen just last week! The locksmith who came for me gave me his personal phone number though and said if I needed help again, I could call him directly and he could give a better rate due to not needing to pay the centralized company a portion. Despite often having social anxiety with strangers, I've still found that just being friendly and treating people well (in this case still giving a tip alongside the cancellation fee after my super finally arrived just moments before the locksmith) ends up getting me better services than any research I've been able to do online. I ended up making a similar connection with the people we hired to install our curtain rods just after we moved in; I was talking to them about how the movers that brought my girlfriends things over to the apartment ended up damaging her desk in transit, and they said that they also do moving as well as installation/assembly, so next time we end up moving, we also will be able to hire people we know and trust (we ended up hiring them again for a few odd jobs since the first time, and we almost always end up getting one of the same three people we've met and made connections with).
"But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites.
And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless.
But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder.
And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response.
You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care.
Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?
This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals.
Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly.
Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.
But yeah, a healthy set of search engines will get us better results.
[1]https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-i...
[2]https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-...
Perhaps in other words, market forces (I'm thinking ROI) and economies of scale will win.
They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things like the rate of new links, type of new links, variations of anchor text / bare links, and so on.
It USED to be very effective.
The larger entities don't really have to be that detailed. If you have that brand power, you can just cut partnership/cross-link deals and pay a little attention to things like anchor text in links, contextual text around the link, etc.
Edit: Ah, yeah, agreed. What got lost in all this was good content that had no big brand behind it. The indiscriminate hammer Google used to kill off small-guy SEO spam also pushed a lot of actually good stuff, stuff that never did any SEO at all, off the first page.
What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.