Yipit Blog

Since our prototype has been out for a few weeks now, we thought it was time for an update.

Traffic
So far we’ve had thousands of users and tens of thousands of local searches. We’re excited to see what happens as we start expanding to more categories.

Furniture Store Partners
We started to set up a few partnerships with some top-tier showrooms. Now, you’ll receive If you 5% off if you mention Yipit at any of them:

• Sit Down New York (great place for discount modern furniture)
• New York Lighting (one of the best lighting stores in the city)
• Manhattan Cabinetry (experts on murphy beds and cabinets)
• International Furniture (one of the largest discount showrooms in the city)

Features
We’ve been thinking of all the ways our repository of store inventories can be useful to people. Here are a few we’ve implemented:

• Tweetscout - twitter account that announces sales in NYC showrooms. You can also send a furniture query to @tweetscout, and you’ll get an answer right away
• Furnication - a new Manhattan furniture blog, based inventory data of every showroom and what we’ve learned. For example, find the cheapest futon in Manhattan, the thrift store that picks up the quickest, or even the easiest way to shop at IKEA.
• A bigger idea we’ll tell you about soon

A big thanks to everyone so far. We’ll keep you posted on more.

We have some exciting news: A few moments ago, we released Yipit!

Here are the highlights:

• Search every NYC home furniture store for couches, beds, dining tables, bookshelves and 56 other home furniture and lighting products
• Specify the price range (from cheap to luxury), the style of furniture (modern, traditional), the material (leather, rattan, fabric), the condition (used, new) and more
• We’ve included the website of almost every store, as well as links to coverage in NY Times, NY Magazine and Apartment Therapy, and links to Yelp, NY Magazine and CitySearch profiles
• Find stores near an address, zip code or over 60 Manhattan neighborhoods including Upper East Side, Chelsea, Lower East Side

We’re 100% focused on adding more and more product and service categories, as well as new ways to interact with that data. In fact, we will never stop adding categories and features. We have a list of literally hundreds of possible features, but we wanted to let everyone start using Yipit as soon as possible. That way we can incorporate your experiences and feedback and become more and more useful. You can track our progress through the Yipit Blog or by following our twitter account.

Thanks again to everyone who gave us early feedback on Yipit. Please continue to let us know what you would like to see (from features to categories). We’re very excited about Yipit and hope we will be able to help you find the right stores selling the products you want.

Local search results have been disappointing users for years. The main reliable source of data about local businesses remains the antiquated yellow pages’ 300-or-so categories. If you want to search by a more specific category, the results are spotty at best. So, what’s the solution?

Well, there are two proposals: 1) local user reviews / content and 2) more accurate business data. Clearly, both will be necessary but many new local search companies seem to putting their chips behind proposal #1. We at Yipit are focusing on proposal #2. Who’s right? That will hopefully be debated at a panel Yipit proposed for SXSW’s interactive festival. I say hopefully because the panels are determined, in part, by a vote. So, if you care to support Yipit and the local search industry, please submit your vote for our panel: The Local Search Solution - Context or Accuracy? I’m not going to say that this is more important that voting for the national election, but I’m also not going to say that.

As for the panel speakers, we are pleased to announce the following highly-respected members of the local search community have agreed to participate on the panel we suggested:

• Sebastian Provencher, Praized, author of the Praized Blog
• Perry Evans, CEO of Local Matters, co-founder of MapQuest
• Peter Krasilovsky, The Kelsey Group, author of Local Onliner

In addition to our panel, I would encourage everyone to also vote for another excellent panel proposal from Chris Tolles of Topix.com:

• Think Globally, Post Locally: The Emerging Power of Local Voice

In an effort to curtail manipulation of local search results, Google has recently articulated to local businesses that listing multiple business names at a single address is no longer acceptable. While this is a positive overall step for local search, the Manhattan local market presents too many obstacles to this approach for addressing mapspam.

Image by Jorge Gobbi

In a city of skyscrapers, single addresses often host hundreds of businesses. Making matters worse is a predominance of mail forwarding centers that provide an authentic-looking mailing addresses for only a few bucks a month. In New York City, address redundancies are not the exception, they are the rule.

There are several scenarios for why businesses might share an address, including:

1. Legitimate businesses sharing a single office building.

2. Legitimate service providers (e.g., contractors, transportation, etc.) who obtain a Manhattan forwarding address to improve their local SEO. For examples, look up Yipit’s address on Google Maps and see our thousands of “neighbors.”

3. Businesses with an actual local retail presence that use multiple names and web presences. See #1 and #3 in a search for modern furniture.

4. Businesses with no local retail presence appearing local by using a forwarding or otherwise fabricated address.

But shouldn’t checking for multiple businesses solve all of these scenarios, and weed out the good from the bad? Not in Manhattan, where the vast majority of businesses share a building. But shouldn’t suite, floor or office numbers correct for this? Perhaps, but they’re rarely available. Analyzing a sample of Manhattan yellow page data reveals the following:

• % of businesses located at an address occupied by at least one other business: 83.2%
• % of those businesses whose address includes a suite, floor or office number: 31.7%
• n = 7,425

In less dense areas, automatically eliminating address redundancies can go a long way. In Manhattan, multiple businesses that share the same address cannot be eliminated prima facie, so you need a local authority to determine the correct answer.

Based on our review of the Manhattan furniture market, we found local search engines’ current furniture local search results largely disappointing. Depending on the service we used, searches for “furniture ny,ny” returned many actual furniture stores, though few major retailers. Searching for “couches ny,ny” returned only bars, restaurants, hotels and no furniture stores. When a user goes beyond the broad furniture category and searches for a product type (like “couches”), search engines break down completely.

We analyzed the field of leading local search options including: Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Ask City / Citysearch, YellowPages.com and Yelp. We performed two searches, “furniture ny,ny” and “couches ny,ny” and looked at the top ten results. We excluded YellowPages.com from the survey because the results, ignoring the advertisements, were just listed in alphabetical order with no attempt at classifying based on quality.

The following tables summarizes our results. For each search engine’s top ten results, the first column of numbers represent the percentage of stores that sell any furniture and the second column indicates the percentage of stores that carry a wide selection.

Top 10 Results for “furniture ny,ny”:

Top 10 Results for “couches ny,ny”:

Here are some selected observations regarding the quality of the results returned by search engine.

Google Maps. Of the big three, Google Maps did the best with the furniture search returning eight out of ten actual furniture stores (though one of the results had an old address). The other two results were “A Salt and Battery” (their #3 result and an excellent fish and chips restaurant) and a furniture store that closed six months ago. However, only two of the eight furniture stores offer a wide selection of furniture pieces. Unfortunately, when it came to the couches search, Google broke down; they returned mostly hotels and one web design shop but no furniture stores.

Yahoo Local. We were most disappointed by Yahoo Local’s results. For a major, yellow pages defined category like furniture, just 2 actual furniture stores were returned, neither of which were major furniture stores. Also, their #4 and #7 results were the same business. As for couches, they returned four actual furniture stores but none had a sizable selection of couches.

Ask City / Citysearch. When Ask combined with Citysearch to provide a new local search engine, we thought they would be a strong competitor in the market. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have pulled it off. Ask City returned only five actual furniture stores (they also returned two stores that have been closed for months). Of those five furniture stores, only one was a major furniture store. When it came to the couches search, where we thought they could have an advantage with Citysearch’s database, they were unable to return any actual furniture stores.

Yelp. Yelp surprised us the most. They successfully returned ten furniture stores. While only four of those were major retailers, the stores they returned seemed to be driven by quantity and quality of user reviews. However, they do not seem to be able to handle more specific searches. Searching for couches returned only one actual furniture store with the remaining results being bars / lounges.

Conclusion. We were surprised by the low quality of the local search results we received. For a general category like furniture, we expected much better results (20% high quality results is disappointing). When it comes to going beyond one of the broad categories and searching more specifically (e.g., “couches”), it is clear that search engines do not have an answer. When product-type data is not readily available online, search engines will try to use whatever other context they have around the business (web page results, user reviews) to try to find relevant results. But, ultimately, that leads to highly inaccurate listings. We continue to believe that accuracy is one of the major components of building a successful local search engine and do not think current local search data / algorithms can provide it.

See Yipit results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.

When we tackle a new category, we don’t just grab a shirttail or push it out of bounds. We Terry Tate Office Linebacker it.

Here’s an update on what we have been doing with our first major category: home furniture.

Terry Tate Office Linebacker

Step 1. Learn how to shop for furniture

To ascertain the key questions and decision factors facing NYC furniture shoppers, we looked at the following:

Industry Experts. We consumed every NYC design and shopping journal we could get our hands on, including: Apartment Therapy New York, New York Magazine, Daily Candy New York, Daily Dose, Design*Sponge, Dwell Blog, NYT Home & Garden, and many more.

Taxonomy. To formulate a universe of products, we scoured major furniture websites, like Ikea, Rooms To Go and Furniture.com, as well as the websites of local showrooms. We learned how stores organize their inventory and (hopefully) how shoppers expect that inventory to be organized.

Interviews. We solicited as much feedback as possible from store owners, interior designers, and friends.

Step 2. Find every furniture store

Next we compiled a list of every business that could possibly sell furniture. We:

1. Acquired detailed business listings data from provider Localeze. We looked at a lot of vendors, but were particularly impressed by Localeze’s proprietary listings compilation process (see this case study PDF for more info).
2. From the Localeze database, we included all businesses that: (i) were in a furniture related category or (ii) had furniture or a related term in the name.
3. Looked up websites of major retail chains and added Manhattan locations not already on our list.
   
4. Added any showrooms mentioned in the NYC design and shopping media that we did not already have.
   

Eventually, we narrowed our list down to approximately 2,000 furniture stores.

Step 3. Understand every store

Finally we needed to learn as much as possible about every store. Here’s how we did it:

Went Door to Door. Seriously. Some had closed, some didn’t sell furniture, and some were awesome. For every furniture store, we documented what each store sold and what made them special. We collected over 400 points of data at each location. We also spoke to as many people as we could – the owners, the clerks and the customers.

Went Webpage to Webpage. We also reviewed the stores’ websites, news media / blog references and online profiles on sites like Yelp, Citysearch and New York Magazine. We’ve organized all this research and will display it on each store’s Yipit profile.

Step 4: To be decided

We want to be ridiculously thorough. That’s why we’re releasing Yipit as early as possible, so we can gather feedback on how to maximize the information on each business and continue to improve our results.

Coming up with the methodology above was a challenge for us: lots of research, mistakes and hard work. But, now that we have the experience under out belt, we will be able to aggressively expand into other categories. We also recognize that it’s not in any way perfect. So, if you have any ideas at all on how we can improve it / sources to check, please email us or leave a comment.

Update: Check out Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.

Each product you shop for raises a different set of questions, and we want to be able to answer them for every category. That’s why we’re building New York local search one category at a time.

Image by S. Jones

The first one is Home Furniture. Here’s how we picked it:

Challenge. We wanted to start with a really difficult category, one wrought with opaque, disorganized, mostly offline information. Turns out there are a lot of them, though furniture is definitely a good example. Search “Furniture” on Google or Yahoo, and you’ll receive mediocre results. Search for the actual type of furniture you’re interested in, and you will be very disappointed.

Granularity. We aim to go way deeper than any other local search site, and satisfy diverse preferences of style, price and materials. In other words, if you’re looking for a mailbox all you need to know is location, but deciding which furniture store to visit requires more granularity. For example, you might want to know who carries low-priced modern leather sofas.

Volume. Which vertical has the most searches? Analyzing search volume via Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and Overture (RIP) provided a list of highly searched categories in New York, such as restaurants, salons, florists, hardware and furniture stores.

Number of Stores. We wanted to release our product right away, so we can start collecting feedback as soon as possible. There are a relatively limited number of furniture stores (currently we track around 350 consumer facing showrooms specializing in Home Furniture and Lighting).

Adjacencies. We’re planning on quickly expanding to other categories. If we start to nail Home Furniture, we’ll widen our net to Office Furniture, Appliances and Electronics.

So that’s how we chose our initial category. Since then, we’ve gone crazy trying to deliver the perfect local search results for Manhattan furniture. Hopefully our results will demonstrate the power of “deep local search.”

Update. So how did we do? Decide for yourself: here are Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.

We would like to introduce you to what has been keeping us busy for the better part of the last two years: Yipit.

To do so, let us take you to a time before the internet and tell you about something people used to do that should seem laughable now.

By: Jason Meredith

Since the early 1900’s, once a year, local phone companies would take the name, address and phone number of every business in their town and organize them by categories like lawyers, restaurants and furniture stores. They would then print this list in a big book and distribute these heavy directories to every home in the city.

It seems pretty silly but it was the only way that people in town could find the businesses they were looking for. In fact, people used these books all the time. By 2000, people were using the yellow pages 14.9 billion times a year. But then, the internet came along.

If there was any business that the internet should make better, it was these printed directories. Internet-based local directories would have numerous significant advantages over their printed predecessors. To name a few of these advantages:

1. Updated continuously, not annually
2. Search for whatever business category desired, not just the 300+ preselected categories
3. Only look at businesses near your address or neighborhood
4. See the businesses on a map and get directions
5. Find businesses using your phone

With all of these advantages, hundreds of websites launched poised to make the printed yellow pages obsolete including CitySearch, Google Local, Yelp and, even the print directories came out with their own version, Yellow Pages Online. It looked like the printed yellow pages were done.

But, that’s where our story takes a curious turn. Despite years of local search innovation, accelerated internet usage, massive broadband adoption, people are still using the printed yellow pages - 13.4 billion times a year in 2007. How could that be? Why haven’t internet directories and their seemingly superior product taken over?

Well, it turns out that despite all of the clear advantages of being on the internet, consumers find internet local directories unsatisfying. We spent a lot of time trying to understand what went wrong and there are many reasons; but, the following are the most glaring:

1. The majority of local business information is not available online. Without the data, local search engines like Google can’t provide comprehensive results.
2. Local internet search results are neither accurate nor complete. You search for a furniture store, you get a restaurant. You search for blender, you get a theater.

What was most interesting about these two pitfalls was that these problems, while not easy, didn’t seem insurmountable. The key to the problem is that you need to focus on a single geographic market. You could collect the information from the local businesses and use that data to provide accurate and complete results to local search queries for that market.

So, that’s what Yipit has been working on. We are going to provide accurate and complete local search results for Manhattan and we are going to do it one category at a time. The first category we have been breaking down is home furniture which we will launch later this summer.

We are very excited about the data we are collecting and the product we are building. It’s the culmination of two years of research, hard work and many lessons learned. Everyone believes that online local directories are the future of local search. Yipit is going to help people believe it’s the present.