June 18, 2009

AT&T Plans a Mashup of Yellow Pages and Social Networking for the Under-30 Set

Yellow Pages are a great source of income for AT&T - $1.3 billion in the first quarter of the year, to be exact. But according to Forbes, AT&T is planning a new kind of Yellow Pages designed specifically for a younger demographic.

It's no surprise really. The under-30 set probably didn't grow up using Yellow Pages. They're more familiar with "looking it up on the internet." They're also very familiar with social networking sites like Facebook.

As a result, social networking is going to be a component of the new Yellow Pages. They will be developed for web and mobile - including apps for Google Android devices (despite the fact that AT&T currently has no device with Android) and iPhone - arguably one of AT&T's best sellers.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 4, 2008

Top 10 Yellow Pages Searches According to Yellow Pages Association

In 2007, 3.8 billion searches were conducted on yellow pages sites as well as the local listings they provide to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and others. So what are the most popular things being searched for? I'm not going to beat around the bush. Here they are:

1. Restaurants 2. Physicians & Surgeons 3. Hotels 4. Auto Repairing & Service 5. Florists-Retail 6. Auto Dealers-New & Used 7. Dentists 8. Auto Parts & Supplies - New & Used 9. Beauty Salons (tie) 10. Hospitals (tie)

This list was put out by the Yellow Pages Association. The data was collected by Knowledge Networks/SRI.

Want a little insight into yellow pages demographics?

63% are female
89% are aged 25-64
54% are college graduates
42% have lived at the same address for 10+ years

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 30, 2008

Yellow Pages Beat Other Local Media in Online Sales in 2007

Local directories made 9% of their gross revenues online in 2007, while other local media such as newspapers and TV only made 5% online. Douglas Quenqua, over at ClickZ, has the full write up from the data released by Borrell Associates.

While search has threatened the industry, selling ads on the cheap has kept yellow pages companies competitive. And they aren't resisting the digital change.

Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, said, "We don't think yellow pages will disappear," said Borrell. "Eighty to 85 percent of people still use them at least once a year. They're eroding, but they won't completely collapse. They will just transform."

What do you think about the future of local directories? Read Quenqua's full article over at ClickZ and then come on back and leave a comment.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 17, 2007

Idearc Buys Switchboard, Other Assets from InfoSpace

Local search and directory publisher Idearc has acquired Switchboard.com and other directory assets from InfoSpace for $2 million in cash. Switchboard.com was acquired by InfoSpace in 2004 for $103 million. The directory products will be folded into Idearc's Superpages.com, and monetized through its existing ad products, giving advertisers access to more inventory and a new audience, according to a statement.

"With the addition of Switchboard.com and its associated networks, we are increasing the scale of our fast-growing local search platform, enabling our advertisers' content to reach even more consumers and boosting our high-quality organic Internet traffic base," said Kathy Harless, Idearc's president and CEO.

InfoSpace's online directory business offers directory services through InfoSpace's branded Web sites, such as Switchboard.com and InfoSpace.com, and through private-label distribution partners. The vast majority of the revenue is generated from Switchboard.com. For the first half of 2007, the business had revenues of $17.2 million, and employs approximately 50 people.

That would leave InfoSpace with a mobile business and a few metasearch engines like Dogpile and corresponding toolbars. But, as Andy Beal points out: "The Triangle Business Journal–yes we do have a tech industry in North Carolina folks–suggests that InfoSpace is also set to sell its entire mobile division to Durham-based Motricity."

Superpages.com's network had 21.3 million unique visitors in August 2007 and InfoSpace Directories and Resources had 7.7 million unique visitors in the same time period, according to comScore's Media Matrix for August 2007.

The latest in a string of product launches and investments by Idearc in local search.

UPDATE: According to Kate Kaye at ClickZ News, Idearc is touting the buy as a way to get more organic Web traffic, thereby limiting the need to rely on traffic from search engines. "We want to be able to control our own destiny," said Idearc President, Internet Eric Chandler, during a press conference call this morning. The acquisition, which will include InfoSpace's mobile application Find It, will provide Idearc with "more high quality organic traffic," he added. Existing agreements Switchboard has in place with search partners have caps on the amount of traffic that can be driven to its directories. "Once we own the traffic there are no caps for us," said Chandler.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:32 PM | Permalink

July 27, 2007

Business.com sold for $345 Million

Did you ever wonder how Business.com was doing? Well enough evidently. According to Forbes, the company just sold to R.H. Donnelley (NYSE: RHD) for $345 million. The company was put up for auction last month, and other bidders included Dow Jones, IAC, New York Times, and News Corp (NYSE: NWS). Here is a copy of the official news release on the acquisition.

This is a fascinating outcome for the business that first became famous for its $7.5 million dollar purchase of its domain name. Conventional SEO wisdom has considered Business.com to be one of those directories in which you should attempt to get listed. This is because it is believed that the editorial policies of the directory are strong enough that search engines place value on their links.

Revenues for Business.com are projected to be $50M in 2007 with an EBITDA of $15M. About 6000 customers list their web sites with Business.com.

Posted by at 10:17 AM | Permalink

March 8, 2007

Flixfind.com – A Directory of Movie-Related Sites

When you tire of all the user-generated movies on YouTube and want 90-minutes of pure escapism, nothing beats a trip to the movies. Flixfind.com is a reviewed list of links to movie-related sites that is coupled with a movie blog. The sites in the directory are divided by categories which include “animated, black film, festivals and awards, film genres, etc. Under each category there is a list of links to sites. There are also tools to help find movie sites.

The descriptions are a bit of a tease in that they are just a half a line. A more complete, but still brief, description is given in a tooltip that appears if you mouse over the link. Using this site feels a lot like eating peanuts in the shell – too much extra work for a small reward. Hat tip to Research Buzz for pointing this directory out.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 1:53 PM | Permalink

July 20, 2006

Lycos Powered By Windows Live & Retriever Directory

It's been a long time since I've looked at Lycos, given how far it has slipped in the search world. Someone asked me about it today, so I took a look -- and what's this at the bottom of the page? "Portions powered by Windows Live."

So hey, it looks like an unannounced Microsoft win. Not much of a win, in that Lycos doesn't have much traffic. And maybe it was announced, and I missed it. By the way, only the unpaid results come from Microsoft. Paid results come from Google -- unless Lycos is showing me Google results because it knows I'm in the UK and has a partnership on this side of the Atlantic. Those in the US potentially are seeing Microsoft adCenter listings.

Lycos also has a new Lycos Retriever directory that I hadn't heard about until seeing Martin Belam dissect it this week. In part 1 of his look, I'd say he's pretty underwhelmed by it.

He is intrigued that it is an attempt to scale through technology. But that just makes me think that Lycos perhaps dusted off the WiseWire technology it bought and deployed back in 1998 for its Lycos Community Guides. Those weren't a killer app for Lycos then. I kind of doubt doing a similar thing in the midst of Web 2.0 hype will help much now.

Meanwhile, part 2 of Martin's look basically asks if the new directory isn't just a scraper site designed to draw in search traffic from elsewhere. Perhaps. To be fair, some pages like this for Belarus use the meta noindex tag, which should keep them out of other search engines. The same thing is true for the blank page example Martin shows in his report. But other pages like this for Minsk have no such restrictions.

Postscript: Brian Ulicny sends me this:

I was one of the guys who worked on Lycos Retriever before Lycos got rid of its search staff (well, all but 2) in February. It is not based on WiseWire technology at all. The idea was to build an automated, self-updating Wikipedia. In any case, the idea was interesting, and it was a fun project to work on. I wrote a paper about it recently, which I can send if you like.

Some topics came out pretty well. For example, see e.g.

But we had quite a way to go before Retriever was all we'd hoped it would be. In any case, I'm sure we'll see more things like it in the future.

Cool -- and I'm asking Brian for a link to his paper, to add to the above. Meanwhile, Lycos also wrote to say that the Windows Live partnership was indeed an unannounced change and that:

Retriever is a beta project our search group launched several months ago. We will continue to capitalize on our assets with our Daum engineers in Korea, taking full advantage of Daum's knowledge and expertise, in continuing to build out the Retriever product and other search initiatives

Postscript Barry: If you would like to view the presentation and paper on this, Brian posted them at his blog. You can download the paper on Retriever and also the slides & presentation.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:40 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

LookSmart's Zeal Directory To Close

Once a potential rival to the Open Directory, LookSmart had decided to close its volunteer-driven Zeal directory at the end of this month. LookSmart acquired the service in 2000. Though the Zeal site itself is still accepting registrations, here's the closure message LookSmart's sent out:

Dear Valued Zealots and Contributors,

Thank you for being a part of the Zeal community and contributing your time and knowledge to the Directory. After trying to put the deserved resources behind Zeal, we have made the conscious decision to shut down Zeal.com. On March 28, 2006 Zeal will no longer be available. We are not selling Zeal.com and have no future plans for it at this time.

We think that avid Zeal users will appreciate the large, interesting and vital community at Furl.net (www.furl.net). Furl is an online book marking service that helps you save information that?s important to you, share it with others and see what others are saving and find important.

With Furl you can:

Save Web pages to a personal, permanent archive with 5GB of storage
Revisit the full text of your favorite Web pages
Share articles and information with friends and family members with simple email pass-along tools
Use Furl as a platform for social networking and discovering useful information
Share articles and information with people that share common interests using RSS feeds
See what other Furl members are saving and sharing
Save your favorite Zeal content

Whether you are browsing the Web, travel planning, recipe sharing, house hunting or researching, Furl is a wonderful tool. Join the thousands of people that are using Furl every day to find, save and share information that is important to them.

Postscript: Chris Fillius who was involved with Zeal early on shares some thoughts on its demise in Zeal.com, R.I.P. at his Search Lounge blog, plus Guest Obituary for Zeal, by Alice Swanberg there has some further thoughts on the closure.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:31 PM | Permalink

January 4, 2006

Search U.S. Business Listings in Spanish and Chinese; French, Japanese, and German Coming Soon

A DMNews.com story: Site Offers U.S. Business Search in Foreign Languages, takes a look at a new service named Tyloon.com (beta), that allows users to search more than 15 million U.S. business listings in English as well as Spanish and Chinese. The article notes that the Tyloon.com database will soon be searchable in French, Japanese and German.

Tyloon founder Barry Su said it is the only service allowing the search in other languages in one step. It serves the growth of the Spanish-speaking and Chinese populations in the United States, he said, and lets individuals from other countries search for U.S. businesses. Nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population speaks Spanish or Chinese, according to Su, as do 1.6 billion people worldwide.

Listings can be keyword searched or browsed by category. Google paid listings are visible on all pages. Individual listings contain name, address, telephone number, along with maps and driving directions (powered by Google). To switch languages, look for the hyperlinks in the upper right corner of every page.

Documentation on the Tyloon site says that they have applied for two U.S. patents since May 2005 and one of them is also registered internationally. The site also says the company has plans to, "build a similar system on Chinese and Canadian data."

Posted by Gary Price at 8:42 PM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

Don't Overlook Human Edited Directories

Using a search engine to find information on the web is virtually reflexive for most of us these days. We tend to forget that search engines aren't always the best information finding tool. Indeed, some of the oldest human-edited directories are still around today, and often help turn up information we might not easily surface otherwise. Guest writer Mary Ellen Bates revisits two of the best web directories in today's SearchDay article, A Pair of Web Pathfinding Gems.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:43 PM | Permalink

July 14, 2005

Zenome, A New Human-Edited Web Directory

Canada's Globe and Mail offers up a look at a new human-edited directory of web resources called Zenome.

Although Zenome might look like the ODP, its founder's say Zenome has been designed to overcome some of the ODP's problems.

In an attempt to avoid some of these problems, the founders of Zenome (whose name came from the idea of indexing the digital genome, like the Human Genome Project did for DNA) decided to pay editors to review and approve links.

Where does the money come from?

From the Zenome site:

Zenome pays Editors ongoing commissions based on the revenues generated by their Sub-Category, and by Zenome as a whole.

Other human-built directory services like Zeal and About.com are also mentioned in the article.

Finally, some person named Gary Price (-: is quoted in the article mentioning two excellent human-edited directories that are well organized, maintained, and provide excellent annotations about each entry. One directory is called The Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII) and the other, Infomine. If you've never taken a look at them, you should. Both can be essential resources for web researchers. For more info about the LII, Infomine, and other directories that worthy of your attention, take a look at the SearchDay article: The Value of Non-Commercial Web Directories.

I'll be keeping an eye on Zenome and will report back on its development.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:46 AM | Permalink

March 8, 2005

Yahoo Directory Makes Changes & Further Directory Decline The Changes in the Yahoo Directory thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums notes that the Yahoo Directory home page has gained a new look and feel. In addition, sites are now sorted by popularity, as I'll explain more below.

I found it striking that instead of listing all sites in a particular category on one single page, categories with many listings (such as here) now have been broken up into multiple pages, with the option to "Next" to the other pages at the bottom. It's similar to how web search results pages operate. It's not a behavior I recall seeing before.

In my mind, it makes getting a Yahoo Directory listing even less compelling than in the past. Previously, there was some value in a listing because people might "detour" from a search results page into a category page and possibly see your listing. But now, for a popular category, there's a good chance you won't show up at all.

Of course, many people still feel paying Yahoo for a link is worthwhile because of link popularity benefits. So if you're in that camp, the changes probably won't be an issue.

Also interesting is that by default, now ALL sites are now listed in order of popularity. How's that determined? Yahoo has long listed some "Most Popular" sites in its directory but never disclosed how this was determined (such as a lack of revelations in this help page about it). I've always felt that clickthrough measurement, along with perhaps some link analysis, was part of the secret sauce.

The Google Directory has long sorted sites it gathers from the Open Directory by PageRank order. Perhaps part of the change is that sites in the Yahoo Directory are now sorted by Yahoo's own Web Rank order. I'm checking on this, along with the changes in general.

You still have to pay a $299 annual fee to submit to commercial categories at Yahoo.com (if you try to submit and only see an option to do so if you pay, that's a commercial category!).

However, folks in this WebmasterWorld thread, Yahoo Directory Changes Listing Method, discuss the directory changes they spotted back at the end of February as well as paid submission no longer being an option for Yahoo UK & Ireland, nor Yahoo Germany and apparently other European Yahoo sites. UK & Ireland now free submit in our SEW Forums also looks at this.

Overall, both Yahoo and Google have greatly decreased the visibility of their directories over the years. The latest Yahoo changes have the feel of a further backing away and perhaps a precursor to automated compilation in the future. For some related reading, see:

Google Loses Tabs In New Look: Explains how the Google Directory was demoted off the Google home page last March.
Yahoo Category Links Gone Away?: An illustrated guide from me last July, on how the Yahoo Directory has been downplayed over time, plus comments from others on the change.
On Web Directories: Covers ResearchBuzz's Tara Calishain decrying the loss of directories last November and Gary Price adding that even if Google and Yahoo are backing off, other directories are still out there.
ODP Founder Comments & Moving Past Directories: The founder of the Open Directory Project said in January that he thinks directories no longer make sense. I largely agree in this blog post about his comments, explaining why I think we moved to the current crawler-based results domination. But humans still do have a role to play, as I also explain.
AOL Search: Playing In the Big Leagues Now: Covers a redesign to AOL Search that happened in January. Part of that redesign was to drop directory category links from search results pages that were in place for ages. The directory used by AOL? The Open Directory, which AOL owns. Dropping the links was yet another sign of the decline for directories. Still want the ODP at AOL? It is there, via a link on the home page. That's all that I can find.
Is DMOZ really that great? from our forums has some recent, poignant comments from Open Directory editors saying not to blame them if the ODP has problems. They do the best they can with the few resources AOL gives them. It's long overdue that AOL either provide more support to the project or give it up to someone who will.

Finally, want to keep up with what's been added to the Yahoo Directory? New RSS feeds for various categories are available. Noticing changes at Yahoo yourself? Please contribute or comment in our thread.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:13 AM | Permalink

January 24, 2005

Look to Non-Commercial Directories

Even though commercial web directories might be in decline, I've mentioned several times that general knowledge web directories from the university and librarian communities (aka human built) are doing a great job creating and maintaining useful tools for the web directories for the researcher. Yes, they might be small (in terms of total entries) versus other tools but the quality of each source included in the directory is what's most important. Very library like.

This SearchDay article: The Value of Non-Commercial Web Directories introduces a few of my favorites including the LII, Infomine, and the Resource Discovery Network.

Remember, libraries which are often compared to web engine databases are NOT the same thing. General web engines take whatever they can access and toss it into one large database. Libraries are controlled collections, built one resource (print or electronic) at a time after reviewing the quality and authority of the material, determining if the material is needed, and reviewing how the item fits into the overall collection. In other words, building a great collection is a skill and something that librarians take much pride in doing. Networks are also in place to allow a library users to gain access to materials not in their local collections.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:11 AM | Permalink

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