Yahoo's New Local Search Targets Google and Yellow Pages

BY Chris Sherman
August 11, 2004

Yahoo!'s new, feature-laden beta version of its local search service sharply ups the ante in the rapidly evolving local search sweepstakes.

The new service offers functionality similar to Google's beta Local but adds a number of unique features. The features surface and aggregate information in interesting, useful new ways.

Yahoo hopes to be perceived superior to search providers now offering local search, such as Google and Ask Jeeves. It also wants to differentiate itself from online Yellow Pages providers.

"Our mission is to understand intention of users, to help them complete tasks as quickly as possible," said Jeff Weiner, senior VP, search and marketplace. This contrasts Yahoo's approach with Google's mission "to make the world's information universally accessible and useful."

The task-oriented approach to local search largely succeeds. Though there are still rough edges, the overall relevance and accuracy of the service is quite good for a beta release.

Yahoo estimates 20-25 percent of all search queries have a local component, either explicit ("Home Depot"; "Washington acupuncturist") or implicit ("flowers"; "doctors"). Yahoo hopes not only to provide relevant results for its current volume of local search queries but also to take share away from other local information and content providers, regardless whether they're online.

"Local content represents a $100 billion offline market," said Paul Levine, general manager of Yahoo Local. This includes Yellow Pages, direct mail, local TV and radio, and so on. Of that, the Yellow Pages market represents $14 billion in annual revenue. All this is addressable by search, Levine believes.

Sparse, Intuitive Interface

The interface of the new local search service is clean and uncluttered, containing two search forms. Enter a query in the first; a street address; city; and state, or a Zip Code in the second. Result pages are also sparse, returning up to 10 results per page.

Each listing has a link to an information page about the business, telephone number and address (if available), and the business's Yellow Pages category. There are links to a map and the Web site, if Yahoo has found it. To the right of results is information about price, user ratings, and distance from the user's location.

By default, results are sorted by relevance to the search terms rather than by distance. A drop-down menu can re-sort results by distance, alphabetical order, or user rating. Links at the bottom of the page let the user select results beginning with a specific letter of the alphabet.

The more precise the location, the more relevant the results. A search for coffee at 301 S. Market St., San Jose, CA, shows a number of coffee shops within a block or so of the San Jose Marriott, where our Search Engine Strategies conference was held last week. The more specific the location, the more relevant the results when sorted by distance.

In contrast, more specific keywords may or may not improve result precision.

Yahoo encourages natural language queries that are as specific as possible. The site suggests queries such as "casual bars in San Francisco, CA," "Sunday brunch in Los Angeles, CA" or "romantic restaurants in New York, NY." Results for this type of query are good, but result quality depends on terms used and the location.

A search for "seafood on fisherman's wharf" in Monterey, CA, yielded only a single result. Yet simply searching for "seafood" in Monterey yielded 60 results, with many of the top 10 restaurant listings located on Fisherman's Wharf.

I don't consider this a failing, at least not yet. For the kind of specificity Yahoo promises, it combines Yellow Pages information with Web content. It also gets local information from other sources, including "experts" with local knowledge.

As Yahoo! becomes better at correlating structured Yellow Pages data, unstructured Web data, and information from various other sources, as well as observing the kinds of queries millions of users make, I suspect results for these types of outlier queries will greatly improve.

Yahoo solicits feedback from users who find inaccurate or incomplete information. Is one of your favorite businesses not listed? Operating hours or address incorrect? Let Yahoo know. It also wants feedback about offensive or questionable reviews.

Detailed Business Listings

Clicking through to a detailed business listing from a search result brings up a page with information about the business and a map. A nifty feature of these information pages is a function called "Find nearby and show on map." It searches for ATM machines, hotels, parking, movie theaters, or nightclubs. These are pinpointed on the map with a colored icon.

You can search for other nearby landmarks and add their icons to the map, too. Locate a restaurant, then find nearby parking, an ATM machine, and a movie theater without rerunning the search. Neat!

There's also a link to run a Yahoo Web search using a business name as a query. A "More like this to consider" option provides nearby alternatives to the business you're currently viewing. On the business's information page, you can also e-mail the page or save it to your Yahoo address book.

Personalization Features

Personalization is a hot topic, and the new Yahoo Local has a couple of nice features that cater to specific needs.

The "My Locations" feature keeps track of your four most recent search locations. This occurs automatically; a cookie simply keeps track of your queries. There's a link to clear the list if you don't want a record of your searches kept.

Registered Yahoo users get access to an additional feature that lets them save locations to be used more than once. These can be home, office or other nearby locations, or frequently visited cities. Users can edit or delete saved locations at any time.

Refine Results for More Specific Listings

By default, Yahoo Local orders results by "relevance," though in a local context this isn't always the most useful way to view potential options. A number of category filters appear dynamically, based on what you're searching for.

You can easily reorder results in a number of ways, including:

·                                 Distance. Use this to narrow or widen the search. View results within 1 mile, or as far away as 50.

·                                 Category. Results clustered by topic. This feature can be very useful, but for some queries the category list is very long, forcing users to guess at the best match.

·                                 Rating. Ratings are based on input from both professional critics and Yahoo Local users. The rating shown is an average, from one to five stars, and appears once a category option is specified.

·                                 Price. This option only appears with restaurants. Price rankings range from one to four dollar signs, available once the user specifies restaurants within a particular category.

·                                 Atmosphere: Another restaurant-specific option, this indicates whether the ambiance is family-friendly, romantic, casual, elegant, fun, or quiet.

·                                 Other options. Also available only for the restaurant category, this showcases features such as notable wine list, bar, outdoor seating, healthy options, takeout, late night, and view.

Impressive Debut

The new Yahoo Local search replaces the company's earlier offering, which got about half of its content from a partnership with Citysearch. The new service combines Yahoo Yellow Pages, Yahoo Maps, and Yahoo Search with a smart interface that provides some really rich search results in a local context.

The new service isn't perfect, but it does provide remarkably useful results for a variety of different types of local queries. There are some great touches, such as pinpointing multiple merchants on a single map. In all, it's a laudable beta launch and points to exciting times ahead in the local search arena.

 

Pay-per-Call Gaining Momentum
by Ross Fadner

Search marketing firm Ingenio Inc. is set to roll out its new pay-per-call platform through distributor FindWhat.com in the coming weeks.

Although industry insiders see big potential, many expect a bumpy road along the way.

Pay-per-call looks like an effective tool for local search advertisers, despite the need for awareness of the new platform among distributors. Search marketing firm Ingenio Inc. is one of the first technology enablers of the new platform, which will be launched by distributor FindWhat.com in the coming weeks.

According to market research firm The Kelsey Group (TKG), 98 percent of the roughly 22 million businesses in the United States fall into the category of small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), precisely the kind of businesses large firms like Overture, Google, and FindWhat are trying to target with their local search offerings. Not only that, but most of the business conducted by these advertisers can be categorized as local, too. TKG research indicates that 80 percent of SMEs make 75 percent of their product buys and/or sales within a 50-mile radius of their location.

This would indicate that there should be a sizable market for local search out there. Despite this, TKG reports that there are only 350,000 advertisers participating in paid search globally. Why? Well, 70 percent of SMEs don't have a Web site, a fact which has excluded many local businesses from doing search advertising to date.

Pay-per-call is one possible option for these Web-shy advertisers. With pay-per-call, advertisers only pay publishers when their ad results in a phone call to their businesses. Ingenio measures this by granting each of its advertisers a customized 1-800 number which it tracks to determine the number of calls in order to accurately charge its advertisers.

As with paid search marketing, advertisers bid for placement, but through Ingenio, they bid on categories rather than keywords. Once FindWhat implements the program later this month, Ingenio will create business profile pages for merchant advertisers providing basic information like location, operating radius, and maximum bid amount per category.

However, hosted contact pages are nothing new; Overture also offers this through Local Match.
Neal Polacheck, senior vice president of research and consulting at TKG, noted that measuring the number of calls generated by Internet Yellow Page-listings is nothing new, but believes that Ingenio excels in its ability to deliver performance that's entirely relevant to advertisers' needs, in the form of calls instead of clicks - or even print references. To the local advertiser, he said, "giving out 5,000 phone calls -- that's true performance."

In a February report, JupiterResearch reported that through 2008, local search advertising growth will be slower than online advertising overall, but that pay-per-call could be a wild card with the potential to change the growth curve.

Yet the real issue is generating awareness. As Jupiter analyst Niki Scevak wrote in his Web log, "Even in the most optimistic scenario though, (widespread adoption of pay-per-call) will still take time." He added that SMEs and distributors may face obstacles early on. "Both FindWhat and Ingenio will struggle to hold on to margins just like Overture did when it pioneered paid search through deals with Yahoo! and MSN."

Marc Barach, Ingenio's chief marketing officer, believes that the demand for pay-per-call is out there, and contended that most SMEs have an ad budget but don't use it, spending less than one percent of gross sales on advertising. The trick will be getting these businesses online, he noted.
According to Polachek, it may take publishers a while to warm to the idea of pay-per-call because there's no existing precedent. He said the new platform will certainly have an impact on pricing, especially by category, and that publishers will need to be selective about which advertisers they make the product available to.

Although Ingenio will be the first to offer pay-per-call, insiders say InfoSpace's interactive Yellow Page-sponsored listings unit, Switchboard, is also currently working on a similar platform. Switchboard declined to comment on the new product.

MediaPost Communicationshttp://www.mediapost.com

2004 Yellow Pages Metered Ad Study

The Yellow Pages industry has invested over $70 million in call tracking studies in the past 7 years, resulting in one of the largest databases of tracked customer-contacts of any medium.

 

Unique phone numbers placed in Yellow Pages ads allow advertisers to know exactly how many customer contacts they receive through their ads.

 

The industry has just completed its 2004 Metered Ad Study, which aggregates all studies conducted by major publishers across the U.S. The study is conducted each year by CRM Associates of Boulder, CO on behalf of YPIMA. The 2004 Metered Ad Study includes 67,127 tracked ads for the period between 1997 and 2003 (an increase from 54,937 in the 2003 study and 42,056 in the 2002 study).

 

The study includes local and national display and incolumn ads. Studies were available for 1,492 headings.

 

Perhaps the most significant observation from this year’s study is that average call volumes increased in 2003 compared with 2002 for both display and space ads, indicating that value to advertisers from Yellow Pages remains quite strong.

 

Key observations from the data include:

 

• Calls to display ads in 2003 were almost 8% higher than in 2002; local space call volumes were almost 11% higher in 2003 than in 2002. As the economy picked up in 2003, so too did calls to advertisers. Two thirds of a sample of advertisers that had the same size ad in two successive years saw an increase in calls in the second year, with an average increase of 31%.

 

• Seventy-five percent of the top 100 headings had higher call volumes for local display ads in 2003 than in 2002, with an average increase of 10%. Eleven percent of these headings had higher call volumes in 2003 than in any of the past 7 years. Over the past 5 years, 55% of top headings saw a positive growth in calls of over 5% per year.

 

• The average local display ad in Yellow Pages generates 881 calls per year at a cost per call of $29 (at full rate). The average local display ad for the top 135 headings generates 1,055 calls at a cost per call of $24.75.

 

• The average local space ad delivers 428 calls per year at a cost per of $10 per call.

 

• National display and space ads draw more calls per similar size ad than local ads due to the fact that national ads feature more locations per ad than local ads.

 

• One of the best values in Yellow Pages is trademark ads. Trademark ads generate almost as many calls as national display ads, but at one quarter the cost ($4.67 per call). Trademark ads show the strongest synergy with advertising in other media.

 

 

Ask Jeeves Goes Local, Adds New Smart Search Features

 
By Gary Price

Ask Jeeves has announced a new exclusive partnership with local search and content provider CitySearch, and added new search shortcuts.

Beginning next month Ask Jeeves will integrate content from CitySearch, including more than two million editorial and user reviews and ratings of local businesses, directly into a Smart Search result box at the top of a search result page.

For example, a restaurant listing will not only contain directory info (name, location, phone number) but also ratings and reviews, hours of operation, and other relevant information.

Ask Jeeves continues to expand the use of their Smart Search technology which provides direct links or a direct answer at the top of a search result page.

The company also announced that maps and driving directions as well as city guides for more than 4000 cities are now available as a Smart Search feature. A search for "Los Angeles" contains a result box with direct links to a variety of resources including the city's official web site, maps, city facts (via Wikipedia) and climate information.

Two months ago Ask Jeeves announced the availability of several Smart Search shortcuts including movie reviews, wedding registry info, and gas price data. This past Spring they rolled out Famous People Search which offers with biographical information about celebrities, news makers, and historical figures. Ask Jeeves formally introduced the Smart Search technology in April 2003.

Motley Fool on Next Door Search

OUR TAKE More Next-Door Search By Alyce Lomax August 3, 2004 Local search has hit the radar again today. Despite the fact that it hasn't been that long since news headlines touted local search upgrades from the big boys, today Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Ask Jeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ) both announced souped-up local search options. Yahoo!'s new local offering is already live and can be found here. Something about the clean, Spartan interface -- no ads here yet, folks, as compared with other pieces of Yahoo! real estate -- and the word "BETA" in tiny font below the Yahoo! Local headline certainly strike one as Googlesque. However, what Yahoo! clearly intends to be a differentiator is what looks to be a bit of niche searching power -- sample searches include "romantic restaurants in... " and "casual bars near.... " In an interesting twist, it allows users to rate certain restaurants, much like Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) allows its users to review products. This is an example of Yahoo! moving even more local, considering another foray into the space in late June, when Fool contributor Tim Beyers reported on Yahoo!'s Local Match. (Of course, Yahoo! has always had a certain degree of local content, with its Yahoo! Local pages based on cities as well as Internet Yellow Pages searching.) Ask Jeeves, on the other hand, is entering the local search game by teaming up with Citysearch. However, given the competitive landscape, it seems unlikely that this is the last we hear of local concerns from Ask Jeeves. Google, of course, has had a specialized local search function of similar proportions live since March. Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) America Online unit serves up some localized content through its Digital City guides. What's with the onslaught of local search "me too" news? Market researcher Kelsey Group predicted that localized searching will ring up $2.8 billion in sales by 2008. Also, as lucrative and popular as generalized search might be, localized search has even more potential of weaseling into the daily habits of Internet users. All of these initiatives in the buildup of products in the search wars are intended to keep users glued to their sites as much as possible. (And at this point in the game, not having certain features begins to look downright remiss.) Some mixture of product quality versus search brand effectiveness will likely tell us whether Yahoo! can capture the flag in local search. Google or Yahoo!? Duel it out with other Fools on the Yahoo! and Google discussion boards. Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned. Just this morning, before she even knew about Yahoo!'s and Ask Jeeves' local search news, she used Google's search function to track down the address of a local restaurant.

 

Yahoo Targets Google, Yellow Pages with New Local Search

By Chris Sherman

Yahoo has rolled out a feature-laden beta version of its local search service, sharply upping the ante in the rapidly evolving local search sweepstakes.

The new service offers similar functionality to Google's local search beta, but adds a number of unique features that break new ground, surfacing and aggregating information in interesting, useful new ways.

Beyond offering features the company hopes will be perceived as superior to Google, Ask Jeeves and other players in the general search space with local offerings, Yahoo is seeking to differentiate itself from the online yellow pages providers, as well.

"Our mission is to understand intention of user, to help them complete tasks as quickly as possible," said Jeff Weiner, senior vice president, search and marketplace, sharply contrasting Yahoo's approach with Google's mission "to make the world's information universally accessible and useful."

This task oriented approach to local search largely succeeds. Though there are still rough edges, the overall relevance and accuracy of the service is quite good for a beta release.

Yahoo estimates that 20-25% of all search queries have a local component, either stated explicitly (Home Depot; Washington acupuncturist) or implicitly (flowers, doctors). Yahoo hopes not only to provide relevant results for its current volume of local search queries, but take share away from other providers of local information and content, regardless of whether they're online or not.

"Local content represents a $100 billion offline market," said Paul Levine, General Manager, Yahoo Local. This includes things like yellow pages, direct mail, local television and radio and so on. Of that, the yellow pages market represents $14 billion in annual revenue, all of which is addressable by search, Levine believes.

 

Sparse, intuitive interface

The interface of the new local search service is clean and uncluttered, with two search forms. Enter what you're looking for in the first, and a street address, city, state or zip in the other. Result pages are also clean and sparse, returning up to ten results per page.

Each listing has a link to a further information page about the business, a telephone number and address (if available) and the yellow pages category of the business. There are also links to a map and to the web site of the business, if Yahoo has found it. To the right of search results is information about price, user ratings, and distance from your location.

By default, results are sorted by relevance to your search terms rather than by distance. A drop down menu lets you re-sort results by distance, in alphabetical order, or by user rating. Links at the bottom of the page also let you select results starting with a specific letter of the alphabet.

The more precise your location, the more relevant your results. For example, a search for coffee at 301 S Market St San Jose, CA shows a number of coffee shops within a block or so of the San Jose Marriott, where the Search Engine Strategies conference is being held this week. The more specific your location, the more relevant your results will be when sorted by distance.

By contrast, using more specific keywords may or may not improve the precision of your results.

Yahoo encourages natural language search queries that are as specific as possible. The site suggests queries like "Casual Bars in San Francisco, CA," "Sunday Brunch in Los Angeles, CA" and "'Romantic Restaurants in New York, NY." The results for these kinds of queries are good -- but the quality of results depends both on the search terms you use and the location.

For example, a search for "seafood on fisherman's wharf" in Monterey, California yielded only a single result. Yet simply searching for "seafood" in Monterey yielded 60 results, with many of the top ten restaurants listed located on Fisherman's wharf.

I don't consider this a failing, at least not at this point. To get the kind of specificity Yahoo is promising, it's combining yellow pages information with content found on the web. It's also getting local information from other sources, including "experts" with local knowledge.

As Yahoo gets better at correlating structured yellow pages data, unstructured web data, and information from various other sources, as well as observing the kinds of queries millions of users are making, I suspect results for these types of outlier queries will greatly improve.

Yahoo is also soliciting feedback from users who find inaccurate or incomplete information about a business. Is one of your favorite businesses not listed? Incorrect operating hours or address information? Let Yahoo know. They also want feedback when you find an offensive or questionable review about a particular business.

Detailed business listings

Clicking through to a detailed business listing from a search result brings up a page with information about the business, and a map. A nifty feature of these information pages is a function called "Find nearby and show on map" that searches for ATM machines, hotels, parking, movie theaters or nightclubs. These are then located on the map with a colored icon.

You can then search for other nearby landmarks, and add their icons to the map, as well. This means that you can locate a restaurant, then find nearby parking, an ATM machine and movie theater without having to re-run your search. Neat.

There's also a link to run a Yahoo web search using the business name as a query, and a list of "More like this to consider," providing nearby alternatives to the business you're currently viewing. Two other options on a business information page allow you to email the page, or save it to your Yahoo address book.

Personalization features

The whole topic of personalization is hot right now, and the new Yahoo local has a couple of nice features that cater to your specific needs.

The "my locations" feature keeps track of your four most recent search locations. This happens automatically; a cookie simply keeps track of your queries. There's a link to clear this list if you don't want a record of your searches kept.

Registered Yahoo users get access to an additional feature that lets you save locations that you want to use more than once. These can be your home, office or other nearby locations, or cities that you visit frequently. You can edit or delete these saved locations at any time.

Refine results for more specific listings

By default, Yahoo Local orders results by "relevance," though in a local context this isn't always the most useful way to view potential options. Yahoo provides a number of category filters that appear dynamically, based on what you're searching for.

You can easily reorder your results in a number of different ways, including:

• Distance: Use this to narrow or widen your search, by showing results within 1 mile or as far away as 50.
• Category: Results clustered by topic. This feature can be very useful, but for some queries, the category list is very long, forcing you to guess at the best match.
• Rating: Ratings are based on input from both professional critics and users of the Yahoo local service. The rating shown is an average, from one to five stars, and appears once you have specified a "category" option.
• Price: An option that only appears with restaurants, price rankings range from one to four dollar signs, available once you have specified restaurants within a particular category.
• Atmosphere: Another restaurant specific option, indicates whether the "ambiance" is family-friendly, romantic, casual, elegant, fun, or quiet.
• Other options: Also available only for the restaurant category, these options showcase features such as notable wine list, bar, outdoor seating, healthy options, takeout, late night, view, etc.

Impressive debut

The new Yahoo Local search replaces the company's former offering, which got about half of its content from a partnership with Citysearch. The new offering combines Yahoo Yellow Pages, Yahoo Maps, and Yahoo Search with a smart interface that provides some really rich search results in a local context.

The new service isn't perfect, but does provide remarkably useful results for a variety of different types of local queries. And there are some great touches, like being able to pinpoint multiple merchants on a single map. In all, it's a laudable beta launch, and points to exciting times ahead in the local search arena.

The new Yellow Pages: goodbye greengrocers, hello cosmetic surgeons

Press Association
Tuesday August 3, 2004
The Guardian

Napoleon's famous jibe that Britain is a nation of shopkeepers may still ring true, but the butcher, baker and candlestick maker are being replaced by the aromatherapist, reflexologist and cosmetic surgeon.

Changing lifestyles over the past decade are killing off the more traditional shops and services, a trend picked up by a report published yesterday which analyses the companies in telephone directories.

In their place has come a bewildering array of fledgling businesses catering to personal fulfilment.

Among the new categories to emerge in the 10 years covered by the study are practitioners in the Japanese healing art of shiatsu, nutritionists, yoga and farm shops.

The report, called the Alternative Census, looks at the changes in 108 key classifications in Yellow Pages directories between 1992 and 2002.

Greengrocers declined most, having 59% fewer entries. They were followed by butchers, down 40%, and coppersmiths, down 35%.

Other categories with substantially fewer entries include hardware retailers, farmers, insurance brokers, gamekeepers, bakers, clinics, carpenters and joiners.

Businesses helping people to reduce stress or achieve the body beautiful have muscled in on time-honoured services.

The section with the largest increase in entries is aromatherapy - up by 5,200%. Cosmetic surgery, its listings up by 1,780%, confirms how the market for a nip and a tuck has blossomed in recent times.

Entries for diet and weight control have risen by 1,445%, make-up artists and services 1,007%, and reflexology 829%.

Then come tutoring, up by 601%; mobile phones 546%; recycling 356%; and saunas and sunbeds 299%.

Tim Leunig, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, who analysed the results, said: "Just as changes to the Oxford English Dictionary reflect the evolution of language, changes to the classifications in Yellow Pages reflect the evolution of business and are an equally valid tool for social scientists.

"In the last 10 years businesses have responded to the new opportunities arising from rising incomes and new technologies.

"But if we're no longer a nation of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, what are we? It seems we've not only moved beyond the basic necessities of life, but almost beyond goods themselves, so the areas of growth are things that make us feel better about ourselves.

"Rather than trying to keep up with the Joneses, we're running to keep up with ourselves and with the pressures of modern life."

Richard Duggleby, head of external affairs at Yell, publisher of Yellow Pages, said: "Not only do individual businesses come and go, but also entire classifications.

"Each year we introduce new ones that resonate with modern lifestyles, while removing others that are simply no longer relevant."