New Local Engine Yellowspaces Debuts

May 6, 2009 at 10:51am ET by Greg Sterling

As a microcosm or mirror of the larger search market, there’s no shortage of entrepreneurs who keep taking a run at local. The newest entrant, launching today, is Yellowspaces. It joins an already very crowded field of consumer destinations that include the major search engines, yellow pages publishers, mapping sites, cityguides and others such as Local.com, Center’d and Yelp. It’s a tough and competitive market. It’s also quite fragmented, especially on the advertiser side, which keeps opportunity alive and keeps entrepreneurs coming.

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Although there are some novel elements, Yellowspaces is generally unremarkable in terms of its interface and functionality. The differentiator according to founder Constantin S. Manta is the site’s algorithm and the relevance of its local results. According to the press release out this morning:

YellowSpaces is focused on providing the most relevant and meaningful searches with its YellowRank™ relevancy algorithm, the most comprehensive databases, and a host of state of the art features…

YellowSpaces works closely with Localeze, the largest online content manager that provides comprehensive listing profiles of more than 16 million local businesses to YellowSpaces’ search platform. In addition, YellowSpaces is one of the first local search companies to use the new Confidence Score from Localeze as part of its overall YellowRank relevancy algorithm.

There’s also a mobile site.

Related Topics: Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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http://www.planetc1.com/ chiropractic

Glad you posted on this Greg, hope you get a chance to see this comment since I think you’re the perfect guy to answer it.

What’s your thoughts when these local companies launch using phrases like “focused on providing the most relevant and meaningful searches” or “positioned to be #1 in local” or “targeting over a million users per month” when they’ve just barely launched?

It appears many local sites make grandiose claims (especially when contacting non web savvy business owners) and I wondered if you had any thoughts on that.
Seriously

“YellowSpaces is focused on providing the most relevant and meaningful searches with its YellowRank™ relevancy algorithm…”

Searched for – Thai Restaurant in New York
First page results include Subway, and a few other restaurants that definitely won’t have Thai on the menu.

On a postive note, the Google ad on the right side of the page for “Single Thai Girls” was somewhat entertaining, although didn’t serve up the restaurant information I was hoping for :)
http://www.planetc1.com/ chiropractic

That’s pretty much my point, I see local search directories toot their horns on how they deliver best results yet when I land on pages I frequently find incorrect, off topic, or no listing for info I was actually seeking. At least, as an industry, they are consistent.
seaver

Here’s the search mentioned:

http://www.yellowspaces.com/#a=search|p_what=thai%20restaurant|p_pageSize=10|p_where=New%20York%20(NY)|p_whereid=329488|p_latitude=40.7143|p_longitude=-74.006

First four hits are Thai and then there are non-thai alternates that are restaurants.

I think what the problem here is that this is a local search and there is a knee jerk reaction that it is supposed to be a literal search.

Once we look at the concept here of being local, I think that if I’m hungry I may look for Thai restaurants because that’s my literal desire, but I might be more interested in a sub that is a few blocks from my search location than in a restaurant that is my literal request but is 5 miles away. So if an engine tries to give me what I want that is close, but if a sub is a lot closer and it still offers that to me as an alternative because it’s close… that’s pretty good at solving the problem (me being hungry lol).

It’s not Google’s way but what is the point of replicating Google over and over again?