The company behind the Local.com website — a place for Internet users to search for local businesses — filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, saying it stumbled after a sudden drop in traffic last year, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Company officials who put Local.com Corp. into chapter 11 protection plan to sell the 48-worker company, which has patents for the way it generates search results for consumers who are looking for businesses, products and services by geographic area. The Irvine, Calif.-based company said that Local.com draws about 14 million monthly visitors, and took in $83 million in revenue last year from advertising such as pay-per-click, pay-per-call and banner ads. But it struggled after a drop in visitors in the first quarter of last year, which meant that it collected less than the $1.6 million it expected to receive from Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. for generating traffic for the search engines. Company officials weren’t specific about the severity of the drop.
