Google and Sensis – The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated[2]
These are my opinions of what is going on and not those of Sensis.
Fairfax (The Age and Sydney Morning Herald) are running a story titled Sensis concedes defeat to Google2. It’s a great headline, but it is very misleading. There are two facts in – syndication and search.
Syndication
is syndicating it’s data. They’ve had a commercial aggreement with NineMSN for a very long time which allows Yellow Pages data to be used within the . The new announcement extends the syndication of Yellow data to include .
If you are a Yellow Pages advertiser this means your advertisement can be found in more places. Therefore the Yellow Pages ad you bought is now even more valuable. Win!
Search on Sensis.com.au
Here is a nice quote from previously mentioned FairFax2 artcile – ‘and abandon its own search engine for one powered by Google’. The site in questiohn, sensis.com.au, currently has searches of all of the sensis properties – yellow, white, trading post AND the web – a one stop shop for searching the Sensis properties. Outsourcing the web search on Sensis.com.au makes perfect sense as Internet search is not Sensis’ core competancy. If you are going to outsource your search it should be to someone who knows how to do it like , or . Sensis went with Google. Not too shocking really.
The Yellow Pages, to my knowledge, will remain powered by which is build by .
1
2
In the Q&A Chris Smith said that there were not plans to get rid of whereis.com.au –
Lots of rumours about dropping whereis.com.au as well which wasn’t mentioned in any of the releases (and yes I work for sensis in case you were wondering).