Switchboard and Superpages - Leaps in Local Search

Switchboard and Verizon’s Superpages both made local search engine news this week by changing algorithms and adding pay-per-click search engine advertising.

Switchboard’s New Search

On Tuesday Switchboard announced the launch of a new user interface that combines innovative technology with easier, keyword-style features for users. Switchboard’s enhancement features several technology advancements, including an embedded learning algorithm, that access Switchboard’s local business content. In addition to making the site more user-friendly, these improvements are designed to boost the quality and precision of local search results returned in response to users’ queries.

After the change, Switchboard’s yellow pages searches can now be made through a single search box - which, accoding to a statement from Switchboard, will drive more relevant results more quickly, especially when using ordinary, everyday words and phrases to find local businesses. “Our goal is always to shorten the time it takes for users to get the right result from our site. We believe that these improvements greatly enhance the quality of our search, utilizing our business data content to help analyze a user’s query, and return highly relevant responses for them,” said Dean Polnerow, President and Chief Executive Officer of Switchboard Incorporated. “We believe that our new interface and the technology innovations behind it let the user make choices more intuitively, rather than taking them somewhere they don’t want to be.”

Superpages Goes PPC

In a partnership with FindWhat.com, Verizon’s Superpages announced that on March 1st, its listings will feature pay-per-click advertisers at the top of each page. With FindWhat.com’s technology and Verizon’s strong sales and customer service infrastructure, Superpages hopes to boost local and yellow pages ad revenue through the roof this spring.

According to a report in InternetNews.com

The seven-year-old SuperPages.com handles close to 920 million searches, according to director of strategic planning Jim Palma — and those people are not looky-loos. Palma said some 87 percent of SuperPages.com visitors contact an advertiser, and about 28 percent end up spending money.

Verizon and FindWhat.com will be creating a cobranded selfservice interface where advertisers can sign up for the sponsored pay per click search ads, choose categories, and update their information.

Rise of Local Search

In the U.S. there are an estimated 10 million small businesses yet only 250,000 are currently participating in paid search. The question at hand is why so few and is there a way for search providers to tap into this seemingly huge market opportunity.

These are the key dilemmas presently facing the key personnel in interactive local media. It’s not so much that there aren’t ways right now to target locally online, but reaching out to and educating the advertisers has proved challenging. For years, the traditional yellow page publishers have used local street reps to sell space in their books, but those same reps can’t necessarily be counted on to up-sell interactive. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Terra Lycos and LookSmart don’t even have street salesforces, and one has to wonder how much effort they’d want to put in for $500 ad buys.

The options for search engines seem to be to either partner with existing Internet yellow pages (IYPs) to take advantage of both their salesforces and their extensive existing local listings or to buy an existing salesforce and build their own localized listings database. We are seeing this crystalizing in today’s news about Superpages and Switchboard.

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