Matthew Magain

We are honored that Desktop Magazine thought highly enough of our work to showcase us. Thanks to Matt and the whole desktop team.

Go on, try out Yellow Lab.

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

It’s built on Rails

This is the first public site that Sensis has built in Rails. The momentum has been building within Sensis for a while but nothing of this scale has made it out to the public. Rails was chosen because it allowed Sensis to get to market quickly. From development to deployment, Rails has been a win. We’ve had many developers rotate through the project already, all of them have picked up Ruby and Rails very quickly with more experienced devs passing on their knowledge. That’s a win for Ruby and Rails .

Microformats everywhere

The Yellow Pages has a lot of data. Every single search result, and listing, is microformatted. I’ll be writing a separate post about this very soon, but it is really exciting stuff.

Building a search engine

We put a lot of time and effort into search. It’s hard and it’s fun. It also crosses all elements of the business from product management to user experience to technology. It is certainly more complicated than performing LIKE queries on a database or installing Sphinx or Solr . Business rules, physical locality, voting and tags all need to contribute towards getting a good result.

Aggregated Listings

Yellow Pages is a directory at it’s heart which lends itself to browsing rather than searching. Let’s say you’re looking for hardware in Port Melbourne. In a print world you’d flick open the book, look for the hardware category and then thumb your way through until you find a business that works for you. Big businesses like Bunnings would list themselves under hardware, but they may also list themselves under Nurseries as they also sell plants. That’s an awesome solution to the book because Bunnings can now be found in several places throughout the book. That’s a win for the business advertising and its a win for the user as they can find what you are after more easily.

When directories put their info online you usually have a modified browse experience where you have to select a category and then you can search within a category. For example, you say your looking for a Hardware store in Port Melbourne and find that Bunnings turns up. This is the way the core site works.

We wanted change the experience of finding businesses from a directory browsing experience to an internet style search. One hitch, if you put these listings online and search for Bunnings in Port Melbourne you’ll now find two entries (actually 5 on the site), one for Hardware and one for Nurseries – and that sucks if you are looking online. So we’ve aggregated listings together that are from the same businesses using some jiggery pokery to provide a single view of a business. It’s not perfect but it makes a big difference – it definitely solves 80% of the problem.

Sweet, sweet maps

Whereis has freaking good maps, despite Google having customer mind-share on maps. You can zoom in and see buildings with names and they have map data that gets updated regularly. You can send a location right to you GPS device, but in general, it is really well tailored to the Aussie market. Besides they look much nicer than the current Yellow Pages maps and so we’ve put them on Yellow Labs .

User generated content

Dude… We are so Web 2.0 – finally. We’ve got tagging (which we index immediately in our search engine so you can find em quickly) and user ratings in the form of “WOMming”. The tech is straight forward, and the features may seem obvious but how does this fit in to being an innovation platform? Finding out how things work in the real world is hard and the questions we are asking are more social. So we’ll build it and test if and how people use it? Do we moderate tagging contect? How? Does a ‘positive’ only recommendation work? Let build something and find out.

The future starts now

We have just dropped the very first iteration of Yellow Lab. It is rough and ready. This is the beggining of the adventure, not the end. We are going to put new features in and rip out features once we’ve finished learning from a feature. Trying out a new idea, measuring its success and deciding to go forward – or to throw it away – helps the business make better decision. There is some good stuff coming down the pike. Keep coming back to the Lab on a regular basis to check out what is new as we update the site several times a month – and please send us feedback.