If you're a small business owner, the whole of the world wide web might seem far too expansive to offer you much in the way of advertising.  I mean, realistically, why would people in Indonesia care about your accounting office in Poplar Bluff, Missouri?  Moreover, why would people in St. Louis, MO care about that same accounting office?  And if your office is located in a large city like St. Louis, why would people on the other side of town care when there are about 2 dozen other offices between them and you?

Such is the life of many small business owners and it's why so many of them have yet to venture into online advertising.  While the big guys, like Google and Yahoo, do offer some location customization, it's useless for owners of business in highly competitive industries in large cities.  Doing a search for "pizza" in Houston, TX returns over 4,000 results.  What are the chances someone will pick your place out of the list?  1 in 4000 isn't a great ratio.

BusinessWeek has an article on a company pioneering a much more precise and exacting search technology specifically targeted at small businesses.

Skyhook Wireless is developing technology to triangulate the latitude and longitude of PCs and, eventually, mobile devices in an attempt to offer up advertising for businesses in the immediate area.  Using the calculated location of a searcher, Skyhook's technology then uses location settings from advertisers to determine which results to display.

For example, you could limit your advertisements to a 10 block radius and only people searching from within those 10 blocks would be shown your add.  According to Skyhook, that degree of customization increases click-through rates from 0.5% to upwards of 4-5%.  In that way, Skyhook says, small business can garner the same benefit from search-based advertising that large companies receive.

Look for Skyhook's technology to begin rolling out sometime within the next year.  The company is currently looking to find ways to strike agreements with the big advertising mediums and search engines.  A sampling of the technology can be seen from the company's freely downloadable Loki Toolbar, which adds location-based search to your web browser.