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 the announcement – syndication and search.

Syndication

Yellow Pages Australia 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 NineMSN search. The new announcement extends the syndication of Yellow data to include GoogleMaps Australia.

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 Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Sensis went with Google. Not too shocking really.

The Yellow Pages, to my knowledge, will remain powered by yellow.com.au which is build by Sensis in Melbourne.

¹ The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

² Sensis concedes defeat to Google