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:
- Updated continuously, not annually
- Search for whatever business category desired, not just the 300+ preselected categories
- Only look at businesses near your address or neighborhood
- See the businesses on a map and get directions
- 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:
- The majority of local business information is not available online. Without the data, local search engines like Google can’t provide comprehensive results.
- 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.
