Here is a very interesting blog post from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land about a recent Nielsen and WebVisible study that found an major gap between the use of search engines to find local businesses and the time and money local businesses are spending on marketing on search engines.

My favorite stat was that people consider the following as their primary tool for finding local business information:

Search engines - 50%
Print yellow pages - 24%
Online yellow pages - 10%

So if you're a small business owner, where are you going to put your marketing dollars in 2009?

Check out the post for all the details and to see how small business owners feel about their marketing efforts.