Zvents has over 3 million events, generated from 140,000 local marketers in its catalog. It gets 14 million monthly unique visitors.

eBay’s Richard Brewer-Hay writes on the eBay Ink blog, “StubHub currently offers around 30,000 events for discovery whereas Zvents users have access to 600,000 events on any given day and over 3 million during the course of a calendar year. Essentially, with this new acquisition (and after integration), StubHub users will eventually have access to 100x more events than the present.”

That’s a lot of events.

The Zvents Team says on its own blog:

Joining StubHub is an exciting next phase in our evolution to be the world’s premier provider of event and entertainment content. Since launching Zvents in 2005, our team has worked tirelessly to build a strong product line for our users, advertisers and partner network. Zvents boasts over 14 million users via its various channels – Zvents.com and its media partner network of over 300 major sites, including Microsoft, AT&T and over 280 major newspapers.

StubHub’s industry-leading service and platforms provide the ideal launching pad for us to accelerate our growth and expand our mission. We are dedicated to enabling our users to find fun and interesting things to do in their lives by providing the best events and entertainment information across our products and network. StubHub shares our passion and we will work together to drive a new vision for live entertainment.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

If you’ll notice the images in this article, StubHub is displaying results for Louisville. That’s because it doesn’t have Lexington as a market. Zvents does. Presumably, this means StubHub will feature a significant amount of new markets.

Campus Daily Guides offers information about local restaurants, sporting events, movies and music specific to college campus communities. Working with college newspapers and Zvents, a local search and advertising network, Campus Daily Guides will be available at 25 of the largest college campuses in the U.S. including Ohio State University, Arizona State University, University of Colorado and the University of Kentucky.

"mtvU’s Campus Daily Guides marry mtvU’s programming with all of the resources students need within the college bubble," said Stephen Friedman, GM of mtvU.

"With access to millions of local listings and resources, we’re simplifying students’ experience and providing national, regional and local advertisers a powerful connection to this hard to reach audience."

Users of the site will be able to contribute content by adding their own reviews, ratings, comments, and photos. Users and local artists can add and promote their own events. Content is provided by Zvent’s, which has more than 250 media partners.

The Campus Daily Guides feature targeted banner ads and free and paid event listings.

By the end of 2008, mtvU will launch a total of 50 Campus Daily Guides on major college campuses.

"As part of the Zvents network, mtvU’s Campus Daily Guides will ultimately reach millions of college-aged students with a local search experience that makes it easy for anyone to find what they’re looking for, and also enable local merchants to market their businesses to this important demographic," said Ethan Stock, Zvents CEO and founder.

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You can see little icons to the right side of the listings which indicate what type of listing each result represents.

Google’s move to Universal Search in the past year and their recent move to expand out the local one-box results from a few listings to ten would indicate that user-testing is showing blended results to be a very popular item among search engine users. Zvents move to provide blended results makes them a very strong contender as a provider for local search and content technology. As Greg Sterling mentions, Zvents is a provider for syndicated content for third parties like newspapers, and they’re clearly positioning themselves as a potential backend for other local content sites wanting to have functionality similar to Google’s.

From trying out Zvents’ new functionality, I think the overall concept is strong although it may require further refinement on the user-experience end. The dilemma for the site is that users who are requesting a particular type of content will want to be able to easily absorb the specific results they’re looking for. I did a search for “concerts” in San Francisco, and as a user I’d be less impressed when restaurants and venues are returned, if there aren’t concerts happening at them.

It’s true that a user looking for a concert or other event might also then be interested in restaurants in the immediate area or other cool things to see and do, but the perception of relevance for what the user requests must be very high, first and foremost. It may be that Zvents will need to rearrange their results listings in order to improve this perception — have precisely what’s requested be front and center while ancillary content be moved to sidebars or below the main listings. Blended results are dependent upon the context of the search in order to be perceived as relevant.

Still, much of search blending and local search results presentation is still in a very experimental stage throughout the industry, and Zvents’ moves are making them strong contenders for the long haul. Their plans to launch an open-source data storage and processing platform named Hypertable on January 31st, is starting to attract a lot of attention from the IT developer demographic. The system appears to be intended to provide Google-like powers to other people, since it’s a very similar concept to Google’s own BigTable, which is currently only used internally by Googlers. Hypertable will allow distributed processing and storage of both structured and unstructured data, apparently at excellent performance rates.

The introduction of the federated search / blended results may make Zvents’ content more attractive to developers who could use the Zvents API to increase their content’s distribution. Developments are well worth watching here.

[BTW - I’ll be speaking on the subject of Local Search & Blended Results at the upcoming SMX West conference in Santa Clara.]

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