Working Search Results in your favor w/ Guidebook listings

Here's a tidbit shared by Glenn, the Founder of the New Hosts Forum on the old Airbnb groups, in his class at the "first" Airbnb Open in San Francisco -- you can effect how your listing shows up in search results, by your use of Guidebook. If you want your listing to show up higher in search results for a particular city, you can get that to happen by loading into the guidebook, more businesses with locations closest to the center of that city as indicated on Google.

To find the City Center as given by Google:

Go to Google Maps, at maps.google.com/

Now for instance, let's look for city center for Chicago Illinois. First, I ask to get directions to Chicago (not a particular place in Chicago, just to Chicago) from another place in the nation....such as Airbnb Headquarters in San Francisco. Then I click on the last leg of those directions, and I am being directed to a specific street intersection, which Google maps has as the location of "chicago". See the photo here which shows what Google determines to the be center of Chicago...which is the intersection of West Jackson Blvd and South Federal Street.






So then, if you want to manipulate search results so that you are higher up in Chicago Search Results, just put in your guidebook as many businesses or entities with addresses as close to this intersection as possible. Such as the John Marshall Law School , Barnes and Noble, and Chicago Board of Trade building seen in the map. Theoretically, your listing could be pretty far away from the city center -- maybe even in another city or state! -- but you might show up in that city's search results due to GUidebook listings.

At least this was all true when Glenn taught the class...