In May 2000, Mike O'Krongli was operating his internet website which indexed websites for London, Ontario. During the operation of his site, Mike realized a few things. The first was that cities do not form good geographic boundaries. Many companies that are valuable to the local marketplace did not fall within the city limits. The second observation was that the website had no marketing budget and the listings in the major search engine indexes were not sending many users. That is where his research began.

Mike tried to find other local portal websites to see how they were handling these issues. The first thing he found (or didn't find in this case) was that they were really hard to locate. The second thing he found was almost all of the sites did not create a search index of the local websites. The third was that they were struggling with the same boundary issues. This was when Mike started thinking of a new approach.

Mike's thoughts lead him to these conclusions. There had to be a complete system for North America with no gaps in geographic coverage. The system must have search engine indexes for each of these areas. And, these areas must have a uniform naming convention.

As a result of these conclusions, Mike wrote proprietary software to allow a user to select the exact geographic area they would like to search using a full search engine index, not just descriptions as most other local sites do. Further defining your search by selecting which categories results should come from allows users to find local information much easier.