On Monday, Foursquare unveiled a brand-new home page that prominently features its Foursquare Explore search tool, which is now open to anyone, even if they’re not signed in to an account.
It was a bold move and a warning shot in the direction of big local-search players like Yelp and Google. The title of Foursquare’s blog post announcing the new home page even proclaims that the company is “Reinventing local search for everyone.”
With Foursquare making such an audacious claim, it’s worth examining just how helpful Foursquare Explore is compared with Yelp and Google+ Local. We’ll do exactly that, evaluating each local-search product in five categories: presentation, ratings, filtering, deals and usability. To keep things simple, we’ll conduct a search for “food” near our office’s address in downtown Manhattan.
Presentation
Foursquare’s home page is reminiscent of Google’s home page, and that’s a good thing. The placement of the Foursquare Explore box in the middle of the page and the distance between it and the peripheral objects leave no question that it’s the vehicle that users should take for a spin. It also keeps things simple with a box for keywords (e.g., burgers, shake, shopping) and location, along with examples below the search box.
Once a user enters search terms and hits the “Search” button, they’re taken to an easy-to-understand results page. The color scheme for the bubbles on the map to the right is easy enough to figure out after a few cursor hovers
Network
