Yellowpages.ca offers merchants an online presence, users relevant results

How does the new website from the Yellow Pages Group (YPG) compete for users with the omnipresent Google search engine? For starters, it ensures that every merchant that buys a listing in its venerable print copy also has a static page on the Internet, which gives all merchants Web pages that can be indexed from – you got it – Google. "Before we started that strategy we had something like 850 pages indexed in Google," says Jean-Pascal Lion, YPG’s VP of marketing. "Now we have close to 10 million. Therefore, you have a lot of advertisers that would never have been retrieved on Google because they don’t have websites, and Google pushes links." Of course, finding these listings on other search sites is only secondary; YellowPages.ca wants to be the first site users turn to when searching for businesses. The new site from YPG officially went live on September 5, two and a half months after the launch of the beta version. The site asks users to enter search queries in "what" (business name, category, brand, keyword) and "where" (city, neighbourhood, postal code, landmark) boxes to narrow the search. Lion says the structure of the site puts it somewhere between the broad search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, and the specific category-based online directories. A week after the site was launched, YPG’s president and CEO Marc Tellier spoke at the BMO Capital Markets Media & Telecom Conference about how YellowPages.ca addresses the obstacles facing existing search engines. "The challenge the search engines have is how to give you a consistent relevant experience at a local level when the entire universe is so dynamic and changing so rapidly," Tellier said. "We’ve forced you to a structured search, but we give you a structured local result, which is high value because if you start with the fact that 80% of our disposable income is spent within a six to eight kilometre radius of our home, having that local relevance is key." When Canadian NEW MEDIA caught up with Lion last week, he explained that YPG injected the search engine with intelligence so it gives relevant results. The logs from the past incarnation of the search engine showed what the most common landing points for queries were. So, for example, if you search "Honda" in the what and "Toronto" in the where, Lion says the site will first push listings for car dealers based on past knowledge. It’s this specificity that leads Tellier and Lion to call YellowPages.ca a ‘find’ engine, not a search engine. "The beauty of our website is, because it is named yellowpages.ca, you don’t go there to find the next movie, you go there because you’re looking for something that is related to what you’d usually find in the Yellow Pages directory," says Lion. "So by the very nature of our search engine, people are already looking for something ." A similar search structure can also be found at Google Maps, where the business listings are provided by YellowPages.ca, which can be linked to at the bottom of the Google page. Lion says that YellowPages.ca has more than 20 alternative entry doors, including Canada411.ca, Canoe.ca and Canada.com. These sites have co-branded with YPG because of the massive database it has established simply by digitizing its print book. But the site is not intended as a replacement for the book. "I like to remind people that innovation in our industry back in 1982 was the introduction of the colour red," joked Tellier during his address at the BMO conference. Indeed, the improved yellowpages.ca find engine is just another incremental development in the history of the Yellow Pages directory.

Yellowpages.ca offers merchants an online presence, users relevant results

Broadcast | October 3, 2006

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