Foursquare is in talks with search engine providers including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo about including data from the location-sharing service into their results.
In an interview with the Telegraph, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley says that trending data from Foursquare could enrich search results.
“We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”
This could truly be a powerful service. Imagine wanting to visit a popular bar. You could search for local bars by current popularity – how many people are currently there. With only 2 million or so Foursquare users worldwide at the moment , you’re most likely to find the places most popular with early adopters. Still, it’s growing fast so expect a service like this to become more useful over time.
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We’d imagine search engines will opt to take data from other check-in services such as Gowalla and Twitter’s new, currently US-only Places feature as well to improve the amount of data available. Google could use data from its Latitude service combined with its own place database to add even more diversity to its own results.
Crowley tells the Telegraph that there’s currently no timeframe for search engine deals to be completed.
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